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Warning: contains spoilers for The Jetty episode one.
Musician Tracey Thorn’s poignant, funny 2019 memoir Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia contains a simple line that speaks volumes. Remembering the mid-1970s discos she went to aged 13, Thorn describes dancing with and kissing older boys, and the code she used for the ones that gave her “wandering hands trouble”. It’s a fun, nostalgic chapter that’s written with a light touch and includes some of her old diary entries. One boy wore a tie and had his own car, wrote 13-year-old-her; another was a police officer. Adult-Thorn does that queasy maths most women eventually do when revisiting adolescent sexual experiences. She wonders if she even looked as old as 13 in those days, and breezily delivers the killer verdict: “I didn’t know I was still a child, and the boys didn’t care either way.”
New BBC crime series The Jetty is a dramatization of the world contained in that line. It’s about girls who don’t know that they’re still children, and the men who have sex with them, either because they don’t care, or precisely because that’s what they are.
Which category does Mack (Tom Glynn-Carney) fall into, asks The Jetty via lead character DC Ember Manning (Jenna Coleman). Mack was in his mid-twenties when he started having sex with 16-year-old Ember. They got married and within a year, she gave birth to their daughter and they stayed happily married until his premature death from cancer one year ago. Theirs was a love story, Ember had always thought. Yes, she was young when it started, but when you know, you just know.
In episode one of The Jetty, Ember finds out something that she didn’t know: while Mack was in a relationship with her at 16, he was also having underage sex with Amy Knightley, a girl below her at school who disappeared in 2007 and was never found.
Now with a daughter the same age as the missing girl, Ember is forced to re-evaluate her story. Was her marriage the us-against-the-world romance she’d always believed it to be, or was she groomed by a potential killer who serially predated on young and underage girls?
In a clever twist at the end of episode one, The Jetty reveals itself to be playing out over two separate timelines – one set in 2007 and one in the present day. In flashback, we watch Amy Knightley (Bo Bragason) dropped off at school by Mack, and see her sneak out to meet him at night.
The two timelines from writer Cat Jones and director Marialy Rivas are a dramatic coup. They allow us to see Mack both through the loving eyes of his bereaved community, and to see him as an adult man who groomed vulnerable children for sex. (Ember’s father had recently died, while Amy’s adulterous parents were facing bankruptcy and neglecting her.) It opens a conversation about communities waving through male sexual transgressions while judging the teenage girls abused by adult men as untrustworthy and disposable. Mack isn’t shunned in his local town for, at best, having married and impregnated a teenager; he’s remembered as a much-missed pillar. Amy, on the other hand, is labelled “trouble”, her case is left unsolved, and her short life isn’t memorialised.
Blending 2007 with 2024 is a confrontational move by The Jetty that prompts us to ask how much has really changed between now and then. Not enough, it concludes. Alongside the reopened 2007 Amy Knightley case, Ember investigates a present-day pregnant teen she suspects of having been a victim of sexual abuse. Another local schoolgirl anonymously shares with a podcaster her experience of being groomed and sexually and physically abused. Nude selfies of Ember’s 15-year-old daughter are leaked by a boyfriend and shared among local men…
It’s endemic, realises Ember. Her small community is rife with men who use underage girls for sex, and, crucially, with men and women who know that it’s happening but turn a blind eye. Her own mother welcomed Mack into their home and treated him as a son-in-law rather than as an interloper a decade older than her teenage daughter. It’s normalised, it’s appeased, and it’s not just happening in Ember’s hometown.
Spiritually, The Jetty is a successor to Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake, which pitted Elisabeth Moss’ New Zealand detective against a culture of machismo in a small community that covered up abusers and turned its back on young victims of sexual violence. It’s less poetic and less idiosyncratic than Campion’s series, but it goes to similarly uncomfortable places.
Queasily but boldly for a mainstream crime mystery, The Jetty doesn’t deal only in absolutes. It’s brave enough to show us a world in which it’s possible for Mack to have had illegal sex with underage girls and to have been a loving dad and perhaps, decent husband. It shows Ember questioning why she wasn’t better protected by the adults around her, while also being grateful for her daughter and her marriage. These things can all be true at the same time, says The Jetty, because monstrous behaviour isn’t solely the reserve of monsters. What’s important is how communities permit such behaviour, either tacitly by a closing-ranks refusal to confront it, or loudly through conspiratorial, blokey jokes at the pub. The sooner that’s acknowledged, the sooner society can recalibrate to make sure that when transgressions and sexual crimes are committed, we rush in to protect the right people.
The Jetty isn’t a perfect drama. Some of its points are belaboured, some of its dialogue lands too heavily, the podcaster plotline becomes unintentionally parodic, and the ending is… a choice. But its boldness and empathy deserve more admiration than some reviews are giving it. The depiction of Ember re-evaluating her teenage past and the role played by the adults in it, captures a sickeningly widespread, timely and relatable experience. Most grown women don’t need any other prompting than the passing of a few decades to start asking the same questions as Ember, or to do the same ‘How old was he?’ maths, either about their own experiences or those of friends and schoolmates. We might, though, need mainstream dramas like this one to actually start talking about it.
The Jetty is available to stream in full now on BBC iPlayer.
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