Fay Ripley left Suspects at the end of the fourth season of the show, even though she was a main cast member, to focus on Cold Feet.
There are many varying reasons why people enjoy watching Suspects, including the fact that the show is procedural and easy to follow.
However, when Fay Ripley, who plays the role of DI Martha Bellamy on the show, left at the end of season four to pursue other projects, the show went through many changes.
Why do people watch Suspects?
The British police procedural show, Suspects, first aired on Channel 5 in 2014 and was immediately met with positive reviews from viewers and critics who called it innovative and revolutionary.
Although there are familiar tropes in the show, like shaky handheld camera work during chase and arrest scenes and the typical rule-breaker and rule-follower detective characters, the show manages to be intriguing without becoming too over-the-top.
Suspects’ focus on being procedural during most of the single-episode story arcs is what makes the show easy to watch for both casual viewers and fans who want to binge an entire season worth of episodes in one sitting.
The show does not waste much time on the personal lives of the detectives and moves fast enough to keep you engaged even throughout the boring administrative scenes that do not have as much action.
Why did Fay Ripley leave Suspects?
Although Suspects proved to be popular in its first few seasons, one of the main cast members decided to leave the show to focus on other projects at the end of the fourth season in December 2015.
Fay Ripley played one of the lead roles on the show as DI Martha Bellamy. DI Bellamy formed one third of the team of detectives who investigated various cases from the beginning of the show.
DS Jack Weston and DC Charlie Steele make up the remaining two thirds of the trio.
However, at the end of the fourth season of the show, Fay Ripley’s character is fatally shot. This means that she did not return to the show for its fifth season, which started airing in 2016.
Even though DI Bellamy’s murder came as a shock to many fans of the show, the creators behind the series actually purposefully chose to write Fay Ripley out of Suspects at that time so that she could focus on her new show called Cold Feet.
Since Fay Ripley had become such an integral part of the show over the years, three new actors were cast to fill the space when she left.
The introduction of these characters into the show was as well-planned as DI Bellamy’s death and it happened under the guise that they were investigating her murder.
Why was DI Martha Bellamy’s death so dramatic?
In an interview, Kara Manley, the Series Producer of Suspects, and Paul Marquess, who is the Producer and Co-creator, confirmed that they wanted DI Martha Bellamy’s death and, subsequently, Fay Ripley’s departure from the show to be an appropriate and satisfying send-off.
If the death had happened off-screen, audiences would have been upset about the fact that Fay Ripley left the show in such an underwhelming fashion.
It also gave the creators the perfect opportunity to take a new direction with the show’s writing and focus.
Who were the three people to replace Fay Ripley on Suspects?
The new characters that were introduced in the fifth season of Suspects to investigate DI Bellamy’s murder were Lenora Crichlow in the role of DS Alisha Brooks, James Murray as DCI Daniel Drummond, and Perry Fitzpatrick as TDC Gary Roscoe.
The introduction of these actors and characters helped to take the show in an entirely new direction in this season and this new, fresh approach was reinforced when season five ended up being the first season to have a single story arc throughout an entire season of Suspects.
This not only changed the format of the storytelling of the show, but it also led to audiences getting to see more of the detectives’ personal lives, which was a welcome change for some fans who may have been hoping for this kind of development for a while at that point in the show.
How did the detectives prepare for their new roles?
After Fay Ripley left Suspects, everyone in the cast and crew knew that audiences would need some convincing to warm up to the new detectives.
To compensate for this, the new detectives attended a workshop with a retired police officer so that the show could maintain the same sense of realism and accuracy that it was known for before all of the changes that happened at the end of season four.