The 'Unforgotten' Season 6 Premiere Introduces "The Case of Gerard Cooper"

It's been two years since Unforgotten last graced PBS with Season 5; however, Masterpiece's super-popular mystery series has never been a show to stand on ceremony or provide a lot of table setting to get viewers up to speed. That might be because our leads, DI Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) and DI Jessie James (Sinead Keenan), rarely sit down at tables for meals, since they're both workaholics married to their jobs.

In fairness, Jess clearly wasn't all that into sitting down for an apology, "I had sex with your sister again" dinner with her husband Steve (Andrew Lancel), anyway. The call that Dr. Leanne Balcombe (Georgia Mackenzie) has turned up sections of a spine from a dismembered body in the Whitney Marsh was well timed.

Before we delve into this season's suspect roster, let's take a moment to examine the opening credits, which this season feature a shot of a whiteboard with "COVID" scrawled on it (complete with scare quotes). The pandemic upended filming for Season 4, which had already been written when production shut down. At the time, series creator Chris Lang chose not to rewrite the script to include the current crisis; Season 5 was already overstuffed with Keenan's arrival on top of the usual case structure, so there was no time to discuss such things. However, now that we're five years on, we're having a case that will include the fallout from a time period that technically never existed in the world of the show.