It's good to see!!

Lol, domino!

It is exciting to see fifi! I know Jane! haha!

channel 5 have posted the official synopsis the 2 part special, I have added them to the topics below:

SUSPECTS SERIES 2 EPISODE 1 

SUSPECTS SERIES 2 EPISODE 2 

domino wrote:

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According to the freeview tv guide, Episode 3 is going to air the Wednesday 27, which makes me wonder if episode 4 will be the Thursday?

and here is the synopsis:

 

Wednesday 27th August on Channel 5 from 10:00pm to 11:00pm

Channel 5

 

Series 2, Episode 3

Fly-on-the-wall-style crime drama series focusing on the work of three London detectives. Part one of a two-part story. Jack becomes emotionally involved when an investigation into a brutal attack on an amateur paedophile hunter takes the team into the dark world of child sex offenders. 

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 interesting! and another gritty storyline....

JozieMozie wrote:

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Jack and his emotions seems to be center of attention when you read these synopsis.

I like that very, very much.

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So using my detective skills (and checking out both the Radio Times and freeview tv guides) I can confirm 2 things:

Series 2 is 4 episodes long

Next week there will be a second 2-part special on the Wed and Thu at 10pm!

(episode synopsis' will be posted on forum soon)

again no Emmett Scanlan. 

This is a must see article / interview from Digital Spy - with Damien, Fay and Clare and also good to read Paul Marquess!

Suspects returns: How TOWIE and The Bill spawned Channel 5's drama hit

Paul Marquess:

"I remember our production meeting for the first series," says Paul Marquess - Suspects co-creator and managing director of producers Newman Street. "I could just see the fear - people thinking I'd lost the plot."

"It was my job to construct the episodes for series two of TOWIE," he explained. "After a thousand years in soaps and drama, it was a really odd experience, but actually it was just what I needed. I started thinking that there were different ways to construct a drama."

Wonderful, in-depth new Suspects piece in the Guardian

(with new behind the scenes photo)

Why Suspects will revolutionise crime drama | The Guardian

Why Suspects will revolutionise crime drama

Suspects is that rarest of TV series – a cop show that's actually about policing rather than its heroes' troubled private lives. Is this what happens when you ditch the script and get the cast to improvise? Andrew Collins investigates

Andrew Collins, The Guardian, Monday 18 August 2014 17.03 BST

The barked orders are familiar to anyone who's been on a film set. "Quiet, please! As soon as checks are done, we're ready. So … turn over." Another voice confirms: "Turning."

"OK, we are at speed. Stand by. And … action!"

The action takes place in the drab office of an east London police station – actually the third floor of a derelict London Electricity Board building – through which a choreographed loop of extras roam wordlessly, clutching sheets of paper to make the place look busy. Meanwhile a roving camera operator focuses on the three speaking police officers as they discuss the IP address of a man in a coffee shop who's been using a chatroom for nefarious purposes.

There are clues, however, that this is not your conventional cop show. The only lighting appears to be the daylight flooding through the fingermarked windows. When the sound of an underground train rattling and wheezing into Bethnal Green station below carries through the open windows and competes with the actors' voices, nobody shouts "Cut!" and orders a retake.

Oh, and there's no script.

Welcome to Suspects, an hour-long, case-of-the-week police procedural for Channel Five that's unique in that the dialogue is completely improvised. Back for a second run of five episodes, it's at once a grubby, no-frills exercise in doing the show right here, and a thrilling high-wire act whose principal cast – Fay Ripley, Damien Molony and Clare-Hope Ashitey – deserve not just an award but a medal, and where extraneous train noise merely adds to the verisimilitude. After just two takes, the scene about the IP address is in the can. The authoritative voice pipes back up: "OK, move on! So that's 16-34 from the beats, moving on to 16-40."

Ashitey and Molony filming in east London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

An episode of Suspects takes two and a half days to shoot: that's an average of 18 minutes to wrap each scene, unthinkable with a scripted, multi-camera show. In this alone, it is revolutionary, a shot in the arm for a genre that cleaves so closely to format that a workable parody – Sky1's A Touch of Cloth – is now into its third series. The breakneck pace makes it cheaper, too, especially with no pesky scriptwriters to pay. (As a TV scriptwriter myself, this makes me feel like a drummer must have done at the advent of the drum machine, although Ripley is quick to reassure the Writers' Guild: "It's good because it's different, but God forbid you'd be making Downton Abbey this way!")

We're all used to the way mainstream, modern filmed drama assimilates "reality" through the use of fast editing, naturalistic acting and shaky-cam technology that supposedly puts the viewer at the centre of the action, but it remains a sophisticated illusion. By coupling the on-the-hoof shooting techniques of documentary with free-form dialogue, Suspects takes fiction one step closer to actuality.

Ripley, who shot to fame in Cold Feet, plays cool-headed but arch DI Martha Bellamy. She tells me she cut her teeth doing improvised theatre after graduating from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1990. She and her fellow players would pick their character out of a hat in front of the audience and riff from there. "It was a good grounding, but I was young and didn't know any better. I wouldn't do it now – I would shit myself."

The first week of filming in this hellish tower block with one working toilet was a baptism by fire for cast and crew, and it wasn't until the middle of the second week that "something clicked". Ripley shudders at the memory: "For me, it's a bit like childbirth, best forgotten." Ashitey, a graduate of London's School of Oriental and African Studies who plays the spirited junior DC Charlie Steele, had never done improv before: "I called my actor friends and asked, 'How do I prepare for an improvisation audition?' They said, 'You can't.'"

One of the core strengths of Suspects is its strict focus on police work. You may be surprised how radical this makes the show. "It's not in your face," says Molony, best known as Hal the vampire in Being Human, now playing action man DS Jack Weston. "It's not the alcoholic police officer whose wife has left him and he's struggling with rent payments."

The trio – and each week's guest stars, often soap alumni – may work without the safety net of a script, but they do have backstories. "We did this amazing exercise two weeks before shooting," Molony says. "They just put the camera on us and asked, 'Why did you become a police officer?' Suddenly, there's half an hour of you talking on tape about your entire life." They also try to "instil little elements" of biography into scenes, he says: he might text an unseen girlfriend, and there are photos of kids on DI Bellamy's desk.

"It's not like Mike Leigh," Ripley points out. "I personally think the writing is with the editor. We are an active part in the process, we put the words on the table, but it's the editor who puts a sentence together. The script, which might be a quarter of a page of prose, points us in the right direction and says, 'Discuss.' It's not just us chatting on a whim."

You could argue that all this is closer to "structured reality" than traditional drama. Which is apt, as the show's genesis can be traced back to one of the behemoths of the exponentially expanding form, The Only Way Is Essex. Suspects is made by nascent production house Newman Street, whose founder and MD is Belfast-born Paul Marquess, something of a legend in popular drama. He went from storylining Coronation Street in the mid-90s to series-producing Brookside, The Bill, Family Affairs and Hollyoaks, along the way conceiving Footballers' Wives. But it was a stint on the second series of Towie that "set the wheels turning" on his dream of primetime unscripted drama.

'We haven't got millions to spend' … Paul Marquess. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

My audience with Marquess takes place in the bowels of the building, in what would ordinarily act as a police interview room. It's very easy to get him to talk. Before he started at Granada in 1993, aged 29, he'd already run a lighting business, and this grounding in retail seems to have instilled a deep sense of impatience: "I remember the day there was this guy with a big light fitting threatening to hit me over the head with it. And what you can't do is say, I'm going to go away and think about that and get back to you. You have to deal with it there and then. I'd be sitting in Granada and they'd go, 'This script's terrible, let's talk to the writer about it in three weeks.'"

Still contracted by Phil Redmond's Lime Pictures after a scorched-earth tenure at Hollyoaks in 2011 (which earned him the traditional "axeman" title after trimming over a dozen nubile cast members), this restlessness led him to swap genres. On Towie he found himself moulding story arcs around real beauticians and ex-footballers in gently modified situations and identified "a new way of making drama". Looking back, he reckons "some of it was as good as anything I'd done in soap".

First, he made Crime Stories for ITV, a daytime prototype for Suspects. "Very basic, very literal", it crept up on BBC1 rival Doctors with almost a million viewers, although the Guardian described it as "not so much Mike Leigh as Acorn Antiques". It was Channel Five that saw the post-watershed potential and green-lit Suspects, its first original drama for eight years. Although its 10pm audience never reached the million mark, the show was a critical success. Marquess believes that critics "responded to the honest intention. It's quite clear what the show is: we haven't got millions to spend, it stands and falls on the stories."

After the success of Suspects, he hopes he has a winning formula on his hands. He'll be hawking the format at the international TV market Mipcom in October, and he has an improvised medical drama "nearly ready to pitch: '24 Hours in A&E: what goes on behind the curtain?'"

As for what goes on behind Suspects' partition, Damien Molony warns us to be ready for anything. "The freedom is exhilarating. You can do and say whatever the fuck you want. I can come in, scratching my arse, eating a curry, and they'll say, 'Great.' It's real life."

• Suspects returns to Channel 5 at 10pm tomorrow.

This was absolutely wonderful and satisfying to read. It warms my heart that so many people see the potential and uniqueness of this show.

'Damien Molony warns us to be ready for anything. "The freedom is exhilarating. You can do and say whatever the fuck you want. I can come in, scratching my arse, eating a curry, and they'll say, 'Great.' It's real life."' <--- this is what you call a perfect job

So after months of excited anticipation... tonight is the night! SUSPECTS! #JackIsBack

In case you missed it, here is a Suspects 2 Q&A with Damien, Fay and Clare:

Suspects 2 Q&A: Damien Molony, Fay Ripley and Clare-Hope Ashitey talk crime solving, improv and playing the trump card 

and more fab new Damien interviews:

Being Human's Damien Molony on Suspects: 'Just brilliant craic' 

 Suspects' Damien Molony on the grittier more confident second series

5 questions for the cast of Channel 5 cop drama Suspects