The Fall has proven to be perhaps the most compelling crime series on the air. Set in Northern Ireland, and starring Anderson as Stella Gibson, a detective on the hunt for Dornan's Paul Spector, a serial killer who murders women in their homes, The Fall forces its audience to spend an uncomfortable amount of time getting to know both its hero and antagonist. The third season finds Spector captured, but in the hospital after a shooting while in police custody, with Gibson and her team putting together a case that will make sure he spends the rest of his life in jail.

"The challenge," says series creator Allan Cubitt, "was if he's incapacitated, where does the tension come from?" The Fall has always been a series in which the tension has come from unexpected places. Right from the start, for example, we know who the killer was. "My initial idea was," Cubitt says, "what would happen if we did a drama where it wasn't a whodunnit at all?" For three seasons, Cubitt has avoided the superficial drama that drives most thrillers. That was by design.

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The Fall is constantly attempting to break free from its genre roots. "From the beginning, I had no real desire to create a serial killer drama," Cubitt says. "I've always maintained it's really a psychological drama." The intense focus on character over convention gives even the most sensational—occasionally downright trashy—elements of the show a sense of reality not found in most serial killer shows. A plot line in the third season involving amnesia would normally elicit eye rolls, but on The Fall it offers a chance to examine the killer in an entirely new light. That interest in psychology keeps everything grounded. "My mantra was, I didn't want to sanitize things," Cubitt says, "but nor did I want to sensationalize things."

The intense focus on character over convention gives even the most sensational of 'The Fall' a sense of reality not found in most serial killer shows.

Cubitt's interest in realism extends well beyond the psychological, though. At every turn, The Fall is methodical, precise. It often deploys extended sequences of highly accurate police work, giving equal time to even the tiniest detail. "I think it helps create an atmosphere of truthfulness," Cubitt says. In its third season, that truthfulness is evident in the hospital scenes, as well. Endless rounds of banal doctor's consultations, surgeries, and other medical procedures recall the old films like Bullitt and The Exorcist. The Fall is a TV show though, and it can't always be 100 percent accurate. "Police procedure is massively about inputting things into computers," Cubitt points out, but he has found that after consulting with expert, "sometimes it's just more interesting the way it's done in reality."

Earlier this year, The Night Of received a great deal of acclaim for its blending of crime fiction with reality. But where that show often failed to strike the right balance between its two modes, The Fall succeeds by leaning more heavily in both directions. For every utterly banal scene of police interviews, there's beautifully sensual scene with Gibson—or a terrifying scene with Spector. The show is fascinated by those extremities, and plunges the audience into its murky world, without anything sturdy to hold on to.

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Playing with audience identification is key The Fall's success. From the start we get to know Spector as a killer, but also a loving father, and most surprisingly, as a very good bereavement counselor. "You see him behaving in ways that don't necessarily fit what you're being told about him," says Cubitt. "The same is true of Gibson, who maintains a cold distance from those around her. "It makes the audience work harder at trying to work out who Gibson is and who Spector is," Cubitt says. "To assess their own feeling about them, have an emotional response to the characters, and then be tested by that emotional response."

That sort of psychological unmooring isn't unique to The Fall by any means. "We've been invited to identify with these sorts of characters before in dramas, and very successful dramas," Cubitt says, referring to the likes of The Sopranos and Mad Men. "I think Don Draper's a bit of a psychopath, too." Cubitt puts Paul Spector in that same category. "The more you get insight into what his experiences have been," Cubitt says, "the harder it is to just simply view him as a monster. And that's compromising, but it's also what's interesting. Because that's reality."

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Of course, what sets Paul Spector apart from Don Draper is that he's a serial killer, and unlike Mad Men, The Fall is often horrifying. "I was slightly surprised by how frightening some people found it," Cubitt contends. "There are endless dramas that are gorier, and far more violent, and gratuitous," he says. Over time, though, Cubitt has come to understand that it's precisely the lack of those elements that makes The Fall so terrifying. "There's a sort of normality to the murderer," he says. What sets The Fall apart is that it examines, Cubitt explains, "how someone functions in the normal world pretty adequately, it would appear, whilst at the same time being, as Gibson says, a slave to some very, very dark and destructive compulsions."

After a startling cliffhanger at the end of the second season, the impetus for a third season was quite clear to Cubitt. "I thought we could conclude the story of Spector and Gibson's relationship." That's not to say the show is finished, though. "I know Gillian is keen to do more," Cubitt says. "There is the possibility that there could be more, but it's not something that I'm absolutely, immediately planning." Whether or not The Fall returns comes down to one very simple thing, Cubitt says. "It would be a question of having a really compelling story to tell." In the meantime, Cubitt is hard at work on a new TV project, as well as a play for the National Theatre. Hopefully The Fall will be back at some point, but for now, at least we can enjoy the resolution of Stella Gibson and Paul Spector's dark game of cat and mouse, and hopefully find some justice done at the end of it all.

From: Esquire US