Unforgotten season 6 is its most topical – but has the show forgotten what the fans want?

The core policing team remains the same, but with each season, we get a brand new complicated web of mystery that revolves around this one case.

Each time, a cohort of characters that seemingly have nothing to do with one another are brought together, with viewers left to ideate just how their stories overlap.

Over the years, the likes of Hayley Mills, Sheila Hancock, Andy Nyman, Adeel Akhtar, Lorraine Ashbourne and Mark Bonnar have all graced the series, with Unforgotten serving up enough twists and turns to get us tuning into each episode to find out who the killer is.

This sixth season centres around the discovery of human remains on Whitney Marsh, and while initially thought to be another cold case (as is often the premise of Unforgotten), Jessica (Sinéad Keenan) and Sunny (Sanjeev Bhaskar) soon realise they're dealing with a recent case of murder.

Not only that, but the body appears to have been dismembered before being placed on the marsh.

As is customary, that first episode does a good job of laying the foundations, giving us just enough of a snippet into each of the suspect's lives to get curious, but also to underline that none of them would likely cross paths in day-to-day life.

And while Unforgotten season 6 certainly tackles a wealth of hard-hitting themes head-on, this season feels a little lacklustre – and it's truly a shame.

Give me a topical drama any day of the week – the more angsty and encompassing outings in the genre make for the perfect kind of material that can drum up conversation, encourage debate and leave people thinking (also known as the very thing that makes TV so special).

However, just five years after the dreaded year of 2020, is it still too close for comfort to be bandying around the dreaded phrases of 'lockdown' and 'pandemic'? It's an actuality that the TV industry wrestled with after life returned to normal – to mention it or not to mention it, that was the question.

Shows like Industry, The Morning Show, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Grey's Anatomy and This Is Us all tackled the Covid-19 pandemic, with some fans loving the reflection of the real world and others preferring to keep those harsh truths out of the very shows they use to escape reality.

While I feel as though I float somewhere around the middle of that opinion spectrum, I do feel as though grounding the roots of an entire season in those trying times of lockdowns, support bubbles and hospitality curfews needs to feel warranted.

In the case of Unforgotten, I just don't feel as though harking back to that time improves the plot in any way. If anything, it just feels a little clumsily done.

Saying that, I think this sixth season of Unforgotten feels like its most topical yet. It takes some pretty hefty swings at some of the headlines that have plagued society in recent times, digging into opinion-based news channels, the use of derogatory terms in academia, asylum seekers and more.

And while we usually do have these rich characters to always dig into, this season's wide-spanning character stories seem larger than before. Unfortunately, though, I just don't think there's enough room to allow these topics to breathe.

One of the characters in question, Melinda Ricci (MyAnna Buring), is an outspoken commentator on Britannia News. Her commitment to her job is briefly tested, however, when she tries to defend an 'ISIS bride' who is legally stateless after losing her UK citizenship.

She thinks there's a case for the woman in question to be considered as being groomed (presumably reflecting the real-life case of Shamima Begum), but her producer pushes back on it, telling her to stick to the no-nonsense rhetoric she usually spews in her Mel's Minute segment on the channel.

But not only is she having some internal conflict over her job and turning to alcohol to satiate it, she's also reckoning with the possibility that her partner Paddy (Emmett J Scanlan) may never walk unassisted again after a tragic car accident.

We also follow Juliet Cooper (Victoria Hamilton), a history lecturer and faculty head at a central London university, who is reported by a student for racism over the use of a slur, which happens to also be a purposefully provocative book title penned by a Black author.

Her career starts to unravel as students scribble the word 'racist' on whiteboards and they try to get the university board to enlist her in a microaggression course.

But at home, she's dealing with a daughter who she describes as vulnerable and seems to not be enjoying life at the private school her mother has enrolled her in.

While you'd think those two characters are quite topical already and have a lot to work with in terms of plot, there's also Asif Syed (Elham Elas), an Afghan man who is training for his citizenship test and helps an undocumented friend come over to the UK.

With far too many inhumane tabloid headlines berating asylum seekers, Asif's story rightfully humanises the people behind them and is a tale of hope, but also perseverance and strife.

On top of that, we have Martin 'Marty' Baines (Maximilian Fairley), an autistic man who lives with his mother, Dot, but appears to be struggling to look after her and provide.

Turning to gaming instead, we see Marty regularly fill his time with online group chats with strangers to talk about women, also reflecting the real-world rise in online misogyny.

But with Unforgotten, you rarely get things tied up in a neat bow at the end, meaning that these characters may be some of the most complex the series has ever tackled in one go, but you're not necessarily going to get answers to all of your burning questions.

I commend a show for getting stuck into conversations we should all be having, but at times, it seems as though the desire to strike up debate within Unforgotten's viewership has also been done by way of picking out the most egregious headlines to little effect.

Sure, we get vignettes into each of their lives, but ultimately, this season feels as though it's more preoccupied with the subplots rather than the crime at its core.

Having been a loyal fan of the series for its entirety, Unforgotten regularly cleverly weaves in all kinds of themes to its central plot, so I know it can do it.

In past seasons, the show has dealt with the likes of homelessness, homophobia, child sexual abuse, drug addiction and gender dysphoria, and that's on top of an already convoluted murder case.

But something about this season just feels as though it needed that extra bit more; whether it's another episode or two, a little more care and attention to certain plot developments, more time away from the looming mentions of Covid-19 or more focus on the crime itself.

Even so, it's another season that delivers its signature twists at the end, even if it takes a little while (and many tangents) to get there.

All episodes of Unforgotten season 6 are available to stream on ITVX as a box set. Seasons 1-5 are also available to stream on ITVX.

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