Return to Paradise imports the cosy-crime formula and survives the flight

Return to Paradise is a spin-off of Death in Paradise, which is the BBC show your mother watches on a Sunday and refuses to apologise for, and which has now run long enough to have outlived several of its own lead detectives. The Australian version, on the ABC from late 2024, takes the exact same machine, unbolts it from a Caribbean island, and screws it back together in a fictional NSW coastal town called Dolphin Cove. I went in expecting the transplant to reject. It did not. That is the interesting part, and also the slightly unnerving part.

The formula, for the uninitiated

Here is the Death in Paradise machine, and it has not changed since 2011. A slightly mismatched detective in an implausibly beautiful place. A murder per episode, solved by the end of that same episode. A drawing-room reveal where the detective gathers every suspect into one room and explains the whole thing while the camera flashes back to clues you did not quite clock. Nobody you care about dies. The sun is always out.

It is the television equivalent of a warm bath, and I mean that as a genuine compliment, because making a warm bath every single week without the water going tepid is much harder than making one prestige drama that everyone talks about for a fortnight and then forgets.

What Australia changed, and what it didn’t

The lead is Anna Samson as Mackenzie Clarke, an Australian detective who left Dolphin Cove years ago, went and had a career at the Metropolitan Police in London, and comes home when that career hits a wall. So the fish-out-of-water setup gets neatly inverted: she is not a Brit bewildered by paradise, she is a local who left and has to relearn the town that raised her. That is a smarter engine than the original’s, honestly, because it gives the returning detective an actual past in the place instead of just a sunburn and a complaint about the wifi.

Samson is very good, which the whole thing lives or dies on. She plays Mack as brisk and faintly embarrassed to be back, and she can do the drawing-room reveal (the format’s one truly silly requirement, the bit where a functioning adult explains a murder to a room of suspects who inexplicably wait their turn) without looking like she wants to die. The British comedian Lloyd Griffith turns up in the cast, which is a nice little wink at the show’s parentage, a bit of imported DNA left visible on purpose.

The one thing the beach town has to prove

There is a real question buried under all this sunshine, and it is a question about what “paradise” means once you move it here.

The original’s paradise is escapism: a British audience in the drizzle, watching turquoise water and pretending. An Australian coastal town cannot be escapism for an Australian audience, because it is just Tuesday. So Dolphin Cove has to earn its beauty differently, and the show mostly works this out by leaning into the specific texture of the coastal Australian town, the surf-club politics, the everyone-knows-everyone claustrophobia, the sense that a pretty place can be a small and watchful one. When it remembers to do that, it stops being Death in Paradise with gum trees and becomes its own thing, a show about a woman who cannot get away with anything because half the town changed her nappies.

When it forgets, it is fine. Just fine. A tidy hour, a tidy murder, a tidy reveal, and you have lost nothing by watching it and gained a pleasant hour you will not remember, which is the entire and honourable business model of cosy crime and always has been.

The thing Australia keeps getting wrong about murder

We do have a homegrown tradition here, and it is worth putting Return to Paradise next to it, because the contrast is instructive.

Australian crime television, left to its own instincts, goes grim. It goes outback noir, it goes missing-girl, it goes long silences and a dead body under a corrugated roof, and a lot of it is very good (Mystery Road is very good). But it is not comfort. You do not put it on to feel better. Deadloch got closer to the cosy register than anything we have made, and it did it by being a comedy first and a murder show second, which is its own kind of cheat.

What Return to Paradise imports is the thing Australian crime keeps refusing itself: the permission to be pleasant about death. The permission to treat a murder as a puzzle rather than a wound. That sounds ghoulish written down, and it is the exact contract British television has honoured for decades, and it turns out an Australian audience wanted the contract offered here too. Nobody had bothered to ask.

Why it matters more than it looks like it should

Look, nobody is going to tell you Return to Paradise is the best thing the ABC made this decade. It is not trying to be, and pretending otherwise would insult it. But the ABC has spent years being told it should chase prestige and it should chase youth and it should chase whatever the streamers are chasing, and here is a show that instead chased reliability, an audience that wants the same warm bath every week and will turn up for it, and it landed a format solid enough to get a second season out of the gate.

That is not nothing. That is, in fact, the exact kind of durable, unfashionable, load-bearing television that keeps a broadcaster’s lights on while the prestige stuff wins the awards and loses the money. The Brits worked this out years ago. To its credit, the ABC just proved the trick travels.