Review: ‘Escape Artist’ on PBS proves subtly captivating

“Everyone deserves a defense,” David Tennant’s ace barrister Will Burton tells his closest rival, Maggie Gardner (Sophie Okonedo), early in “The Escape Artist,” a tense, taut legal thriller beginning Sunday on the PBS series “Mystery!”

Later, defending a client Burton had freed on an earlier charge, Gardner will throw the line back at him; it is a line to stew in, especially because it will have been obvious to the audience even before the facts of the case are stated that the man is a murderer, just from the number of bird cages in his house. (A thin line separates the hobbyist from the sociopath in murder fiction.)

In British law, as I no doubt imperfectly understand it, under what’s called the cab-rank rule, barristers are obliged to take any case they’re offered and qualified to handle in order that not only no defendant goes unrepresented but that no lawyer is tarred by his clients. That Burton has never lost a case means, therefore, that he has helped set criminals free, and it’s in this unavoidable irony that film sets course.

Tennant was famously the Tenth Doctor in “Doctor Who,” a casting at once key to the international success of that reborn series and to the amplification of his own career. And indeed we first seem him here as we knew him there, on the run, coattails flapping out behind. But this is a mostly quiet performance in a mostly quiet, oddly intimate miniseries (three episodes as originally shown in Britain, reconfigured to two longer ones for the States).

Indeed, Tennant’s best scenes are those with his son (Gus Barry) and wife, played by the always real Ashley Jensen, back across the pond after her adventures in Hollywood (“Ugly Betty,” “Accidentally on Purpose”). Writer David Wolstencroft avoids the cliché of the work-driven dad who ignores his family — he’s work-driven and doesn’t ignore his family — and generally keeps his characters and their conversations lifelike. Even the villain of the piece, Toby Kebbell is clever without being, as is so often the case, superhuman.

Director Brian Welsh makes the atmosphere moody without making a fetish out of mood. Without becoming too graphic or explicit — violence is more suggested or reported on than seen — the film creates an ongoing sense of dread that nevertheless is at times difficult to bear. Some parts do feel over-plotted, and some others a little underdone, so that you might cock an eye at the screen and think, “Nah.”

But at its best it recalls Hitchcock in a “Strangers on a Train” mood, not for the look or pacing but in the way that small gestures can lead, randomly and somehow inevitably, to havoc.

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Where: KOCE

When: 9 p.m. Sunday

Rating: TV-PG-V (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for violence)