This crime thriller was so good that David Tennant agreed to play the same detective again in its American remake
Broadchurch ran three series on ITV. Fox's Gracepoint recast everyone but him, and the two overlapped.
A lot of people only ever connect David Tennant with Doctor Who — frankly, fair enough, when you’ve spent years running about in Converse saving the universe. But honestly, it’s his work on the crime drama Broadchurch that really cemented him as one of the strongest actors on British telly. And here’s where it gets weird: Tennant ended up playing almost the exact same character in both the original British series and its American reboot, Gracepoint. Yes, really — at one point, the man was solving crime on two continents inside a single year. That barely ever happens.
Broadchurch aired in the UK from 2013 to 2017 and pulled in over 10 million viewers by its final season.
The British Original: Gritty, Grim, and Brilliant
Right, so Broadchurch came out on ITV in 2013, created by Chris Chibnall (who’d later go on to run Doctor Who, incidentally). It ran for three tightly plotted series — that’s 24 episodes in total, not your endless American 22-episode seasons — and followed a classic two-detective setup. Tennant’s DI Alec Hardy rocks up in a tiny, sleepy seaside town, paired with local DS Ellie Miller, played by the legendary Olivia Colman. Season 1 is all about them trying to catch who killed an eleven-year-old boy, and then things unravel with a lot of emotional fallout (prepare yourself for absolutely no easy answers).
The story keeps going: Series 2 drags Hardy’s own messy past into the mix, and then Series 3 tackles a new case involving a sexual assault at a birthday party, which sounds like a tonal shift, but actually keeps that same small-town tension that made it gripping from day one. Chibnall always meant it to be a closed trilogy — none of that going-on-forever nonsense. And you can tell, because each season zips along, with rich cinematography, unpredictable scripting, and performances that genuinely made the critics sit up and pay attention.
If you care about the numbers: Broadchurch averaged nearly 10.7 million viewers by its last season, which, considering the UK population and the fact you actually have to watch ITV, is staggering. Rotten Tomatoes scores? High 90s, which is almost unheard of for marathon whodunits. Awards? Three BAFTAs (Best Drama Series, Leading Actress for Colman), plus a Peabody Award. Basically, every bit of drama TV cred it could grab, it did.
Gracepoint: The American Experiment
Given how hard Broadchurch hit, it was inevitable someone would try to Americanise it. Enter Fox in 2014, with their own version, Gracepoint. Most times with these transatlantic remakes, they plug in a brand new cast and make the lead character say “cell phone” instead of “mobile.” But this time, Tennant turned up, auditioned, and got to play the same broken detective again — though now he’s called Emmett Carver and does a passable American accent. The show moves the setting to a fictional coastal town in California, and the local newspaper is renamed Gracepoint Journal for the title drop. If you’re keeping tabs, Anna Gunn (fresh out of Breaking Bad) picks up the DS Ellie Miller role, but her name stays the same. An odd sort of continuity there, but it works more than you’d expect.
- The American version only runs for 10 episodes — basically, it’s covering the first season of Broadchurch with a handful of tweaks.
- The plot’s nearly identical, but the ending pivots away from the original, so it’s worth a look even if you already know whodunit.
- The supporting cast includes Nick Nolte, Michael Peña, Jackie Weaver, Josh Hamilton, and Kevin Zegers.
What’s genuinely rare is that Tennant was juggling these two detective roles at the same time, because as Gracepoint was airing on Fox in late 2014, he was already prepping (and soon filming) the next round of Broadchurch back in the UK. You almost never see an actor play versions of the same character simultaneously in two ongoing international series. Both Broadchurch (on Netflix) and Gracepoint (on Prime Video) are still available to stream, so there’s nothing stopping anyone with a bit of curiosity from running their own comparison.