KATHRYN FLETT's My TV Week: Is this the worst BBC drama ever? trends now
Mondays & Tuesdays, 9pm, BBC1 & iPLAYER
Rating: 
Wolf is intended to be a genre-busting drama-cum-thriller-cum-farce-cum-slasher movie with a plot twistier than the Monmouthshire country lanes in which it's largely set.
It's based on the novels by Mo Hayder and our brooding Millennial protagonist is DI Jack Caffery (Annika's charismatic Ukweli Roach, right), a 'troubled copper' whose career derails while he's attempting to solve a cold case: the 1997 disappearance of his brother Ewan just after they'd argued.
Unsurprisingly, Jack feels responsible – and while Ewan's body hasn't been found, he's certain the abductor/killer is the spooky bloke living near their childhood home, spending too much time gurning through his attic windows while Jack spends too much time in Ewan's bedroom-turned-shrine.
British critic Kathryn Flett said that BBC drama Wolf's large cast is 'rarely' on the same page
This is all going down badly with Jack's possessive girlfriend. However, after she throws a party while pretending to have cancer, it's clear he's not the only one starting to lose the plot.
Will Jack solve the crime? Pah! With four and a half hours to go, could I get to the end without begging for mercy?
My one star goes to a fine cast who never give less than their all: in one of the crazier subplots Juliet Stevenson (Truly Madly Deeply) and Owen Teale (Game Of Thrones, Line Of Duty) are mostly left to sob while chained to radiators by a pair of jarringly 'comic' psychopaths (Sacha Dhawan and Iwan Rheon).
The story’s so unhinged even the red herrings end up kippered
The large cast is rarely on the same page, not least Roach's Jack, who retains his intense seriousness in the face of all the schizoid 'bantz'.
By the time he gets into a relationship with bitchy colleague DI Lincoln (Sian Reese-Williams) while investigating a quasi-satanic 'rave', a transphobic social media influencer and an off-grid encampment run by firearm-toting Goths, neither me nor Jack were very surprised by the appearance of a random croc.
Finally, despite a storyline so unhinged even the red herrings end up kippered and a script apparently created by ChatGPT, Wolf deserves to be critically eviscerated for revelling in so many disembowelled bodies.
Look, I've no idea why Wolf exists, and it's clearly been buried in the summer schedules to distract from the real crime: that it was
