Grace needs to spend more time on its most crucial season 5 storyline

But there was no Zoë Tapper as Cleo Morey. There was no Craig Parkinson as Norman Potting. And, crucially, the show seemed to set itself up with an out-of-the-box USP - Grace was the detective who used psychics.

It was a unique, slightly baffling take on the crime genre, one which delved more into the supernatural than most procedural dramas dare to go.

It was a storyline that was quickly ditched (as it was in Peter James's books), and instead we started to focus more on Grace's burgeoning relationship with Cleo and his efforts to move on from Sandy's disappearance.

This move was welcome - the Cleo relationship, their engagement and her subsequent pregnancy was a subplot slight enough that it could be sustained with frequent yet brief check-ins each episode, while the case of the week was allowed to take priority.

The whole psychic element would likely have taken up too much of the show's energy in both categories.

Meanwhile, the Sandy mystery arguably benefitted from a lack of screen-time. Not only would it have made little sense to have John wrapped up in a seemingly unsolvable mystery every week, but also the limited amount of clues we were given as to the nature of her disappearance kept the audience guessing, meaning the storyline could be sustained without the lack of answers becoming grating.

All of this had become a formula on which Grace had rested for its four seasons. After a shaky first instalment, it had found its groove and settled into a workable balance between each episode's central detective plot and the long-running subplot.

Now, in season 5, all of that has changed. The end of season 4 saw the Sandy mystery finally resolved, the character revealed to have left Roy of her own accord.

However, her mental health had seemingly been suffering for some time, and at the end of the season she ended her own life.

In many ways, this could have been the culmination of the Sandy storyline, leaving Roy and Cleo to head off into the sunset and start their own family.

Yet, understandably from a storytelling perspective, a spanner had to be thrown into the works, and that spanner was Bruno, now played by young actor Finn Guegan.

Bruno is the son Roy never knew he had, the son Sandy kept secret from him until after she died. In a note she left for Roy, she asked him to look after Bruno, shaking up his world more than ever before.

At the start of this season, another tragedy was revealed to have befallen Roy and Cleo - they had lost their baby, meaning Bruno's arrival in their life has come at a particularly difficult moment.

As already mentioned, from a dramatic perspective all of this makes sense. Grace has never been the cosiest or cheeriest of crime dramas, and it has always been one to check in on the personal lives of its protagonists.

However, with emotional developments this seismic, I couldn't help but feel while watching season 5's first episode that a new balance needs to be found.

As already explained, a long-running mystery and a steadily developing romance could easily be explored in the background of the series, bubbling away as an engaging, yet in no way time-consuming, subplot.

That isn't so much the case with some of the elements the show is now exploring. The loss of a baby and what that does to a relationship, particularly in a moment of additional turmoil, is heavy stuff, and it really needs the space to be explored in all of its complexities.

Additionally, the arrival of Roy's son Bruno feels, as of yet, underdeveloped. We've skipped forward in time since the end of season 4, meaning the father and son have already met and started the uneasy process of bonding. We first see them interacting at a football match - something which is quickly interrupted by an admittedly superbly staged bomb threat sequence.

After the first episode, we don't really have any sense of what Roy is like as a father, or how Cleo feels about becoming a stepmum figure right as she's lost her own baby.

We also don't really know anything about how Bruno feels about all this. For all the turmoil Roy and Cleo have gone through, he has lost a mum and gained a new family in a matter of weeks.

Of course, it would be unfair to say Grace has failed by not examining any of this in enough detail. So far, there has only been one episode in which to explore these new storylines, and with everything else going on, we can't have expected it to have done all the heavy lifting with the characters this quickly.

However, the worry is that it might not give itself enough time full stop. This first episode felt like it had a similar balance of storylines to episodes past, with the vast majority of the runtime spent on the central case, and only a slither of story given to the longer-running narrative.

It also teased the arrival of a new detective to replace Craig Parkinson's now departed Norman Potting. On one level, there should be no issue with this. Yet, if it means just another character and thus another storyline jostling for screen-time, then we could be in trouble.

If this season is to succeed as an effective transition for Grace, moving from a detective show with a long-running mystery alongside it to one with a substantial character drama as a backdrop, its format may need to change somewhat.

I would argue that the themes it is dealing with are now too weighty and all-consuming on a character level to be relegated to the most tertiary of check-ins each week.

Instead, this crucial storyline of Roy, Cleo and Bruno's new family should now be given more time to breathe, with more exploration of the ramifications on a character level and what this means for each of them going forward. If this means the cases are slightly condensed, then so be it.

I would say that, by now, fans of the show are wrapped up enough in the central characters' lives that they would be happy to spend more time understanding them and their situations and less running around with them catching another depraved killer.

It isn't an insurmountable or overly extensive transition the show needs to make. After all, this was once the series about a detective dabbling in the supernatural. I would argue that ditching that element was a far bigger switch than the one we're looking at here.

Just a bit more time here or there could make all the difference in how this story plays out - and whether Grace manages to find a firm footing in its new era.

Grace season 5 is showing on ITV1 and ITVX, with seasons 1-4 available to stream on ITVX.

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