YMMV / Broadchurch

• Awesome Music: The main theme by Ólafur Arnalds, which is incredibly beautiful and sad at the same time. It was even used in the teaser trailer for Fantastic Four (2015).
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Ellie's return home to collect her things in the first series finale is a very poignant scene until she detours into the living room to step on a slug. Was it meant to convey rage, tragedy, senselessness? The problem here is it's tough to combine a squashed slug with piano music and slo-mo. (@BroadchurchSlug has its own Twitter account. #slugjustice!)
• Broken Base: People who watched for the characters tend to really like the reveal of the killer, and how it affects everyone. Those who watched for the mystery are irritated by the lack of clues and overdose of creepy characters to what ended up being no purpose.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • In the middle of endless doom and gloom, Ellie verbally tearing Tom a new one over his perjury to help his worthless pederast and murderer father beat the rap, and after he'd been such a jerk to her the whole series, is incredibly satisfying.
  • He gets it again in Series 3 when Ellie takes a hammer to his phone and laptop over his porn surfing.
  • In the Series 2 finale, someone finally telling Abby Thompson, point-blank, that she's a horrible person. After eight episodes of her and Bishop's crap, it's quite satisfying for someone to tell this Amoral Attorney what everyone really thinks of her.
• Complete Monster: Season 3: In a show where almost every villain is given some kind of humanizing quality to balance out their actions, Leo Humphries stands out as an exception. Two years prior to the events of the third season, he knocked out, tied up, and raped a young woman called Laura Benson while filming the rape. Feeing empowered by the rape, he developed an addiction and did the same to two other women over the years. Upon meeting a troubled young man called Michael Lucas, Leo began corrupting him with pornography, and he eventually forced him to rape Trish Winterman at a party. During the ensuing investigation, he tried to frame Trish's boss Ed Burnett for the rapes. Arrogant, remorseless, and taking absolute pride in his actions, Leo is easily the most despicable character the entire show has to offer.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • In Series 2, Hardy confronting Lee after getting his pacemaker. There is a noticeable change in his gait and demeanor which unnerves Lee. It hammers home how much his heart condition had been dragging him down.
  • Hardy figuring out Claire's true motive for turning herself in with the pendant.

• Diagnosed by the Audience: Even accounting for his heart condition, it’s clear that there’s something off about D.I. Hardy.
  • He clearly has issues with water— he flashes back to scenes of waves on the beach, has nightmares about drowning, etc. Understandable, considering how he found Pippa Gillespie. Combined with his self destructive behavior and flashes of aggression, it's all but stated that he suffers from PTSD.
  • Taking into consideration his seeming inability to comprehend social cues, his emotional outbursts, his blunt nature, and his difficulty connecting with other people, it wouldn't be too far-fetched for Hardy to be on the autism spectrum.

• Narm: Lee Ashworth's love of standing on distant hills to threateningly stare at people. It works pretty well the first time, but then he just keeps doing it until it's impossible to take seriously. Especially when he appears to sprint like his life depended on it to get in position a few seconds after ringing Claire's doorbell to drop her favorite dish off.
• Sophomore Slump: Series 2 is considered to be far inferior to the first, with the less compelling mystery and multiple legal faults tending to be the largest points of contention; the first series won a hat-trick at the BAFTAs, including Best Drama Series, but Series 2 was overlooked completely. Series 3 is widely seen to be an improvement on Series 2 - with the plot being more even and less contrived, as well as the central mystery not being a rehash of the original.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: With Jocelyn Knight, the writers created a compelling, realistically textured character, cast a highly respected actress to play her, and then made her the center of a storyline that required her to pick up the Idiot Ball so many times that her legal skills became purely an Informed Ability. As a result, her storyline was very poorly received, and she spent the entirety of Season 3 on a bus.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Some fans have said that Ellie's theory that Lisa accidentally killed Pippa and ran away would have been a better solution to the Sandbrook case than the real one, especially since what actually happens makes Lisa being a case of Never Found the Body completely pointless.
  • For those who found the overarching story of the Latimer family and their struggle to find closure over Danny's death more compelling than the A plot, Season 3 can actually look weaker than Season 2; Mark tracks down Joe Miller without bringing him to any kind of justice, unsuccessfully attempts suicide, and leaves town without decisively reconciling with his wife and children beforehand, thereby ending the season in the same place he started it, all while Hardy and Miller are focused on rape cases with different stakes than the murders they usually solve.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Series 1 toed the line, and Series 2 fully leaps over it, being largely just scene after scene of Ellie being completely miserable, to the point that many viewers gave up on the series at that point.
• Tough Act to Follow: Dissatisfaction with Season 2 could only have been amplified by how critically acclaimed Season 1 was.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: Mark, Paul and Maggie all exist in minor subplots in Series 3 with no connection to the case of rape that drives this final series, clearly just to keep the actors in the cast. Mark tracks down Joe and tries to kill himself, Paul is in a rut because church attendance has gone down after it increased in the wake of Danny's murder, and Maggie struggles with the local newspaper's new new owner's tasteless approach to journalism. Beth only avoids this by having become an ISVA and coincidentally being assigned to Trish Winterman, the same person whose rape Hardy and Ellie are investigating.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Sharon Bishop was clearly meant to be a somewhat sympathetic Anti-Villain. However, she spends most of her time onscreen being relentlessly cruel toward characters who have already been through hell and deploying Insane Troll Logic to defend someone the audience knows is guilty, so it's hard to care much about her personal problems.
  • Jack Marshall’s conviction for his relationship with a former student is treated as a misunderstanding that paints him in a sympathetic light, but regardless of the legality it would still have been wildly unethical for a 40-year-old to have an affair with a teenager, let alone their student, due to the inherent power imbalance involved.
• Values Dissonance: The age of consent in Britain is 16, which can cause certain scenes to seem strange to people who live in areas where it is 18:
  • Jack makes a point to note that had he waited a few weeks for his 15-year-old lover's birthday, their romance would have been perfectly legal. In many places, however, the girl was more than two years too young to be having sex with any adult, even ignoring the fact that he was 40.
  • The Latimers make a big deal about the fact that their 15-year-old daughter is dating a 17-year-old. This seems weird to them because the boy is an adult. In many places, both are still seen as minors, so it doesn't seem like such a big deal.
  • The same happens in reverse in countries where the age is 15 or lower (for example, most of mainland Europe).
  • The dissonance is intensified by the fact that some places, like Canada, have a "close-in age exemption" so that, for example, a 15 year old (below the age of consent) can have consensual sex with an 18 year old (above the age of consent).
  • The British taboos around pornography, and the character's subsequent attitudes, can come across as harsh and conservative for people in countries where watching porn is considered more normal.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: Alec Hardy began suffering from a heart illness right after his wife cheated on him and ruined his career by losing some highly important evidence while meeting with her lover. An almost literal case of broken heart. The metaphor extends into series 2. Hardy's heart heals.
• Win Back the Crowd: Series 3 got a lot of people back on board after the highly controversial Series 2, returning to a bigger focus on the Ellie/Hardy partnership and banter and with a case that's largely divorced from the previous two, avoiding any of their baggage.
• The Woobie:
  • Jack. He got jailed and his reputation tarnished for a consensual relationship. He married his lover only for their son to die at a young age. He moves to Broadchurch to start anew only for his conviction to resurface and get twisted, culminating in the town turning on him and forming a lynch mob when some former members of his club provide some maligned "evidence" to him being a pedophile. And even after he reveals the truth, his house is vandalized and he gets a picture of his dead son and ex-wife thrown into his face. He's Driven to Suicide, and to rub salt in the wound we get to hear Chloe complain about how she doesn't care about his funeral since she never liked him anyway, and nobody pays for basically hounding him to his death.
  • Ellie. In season 2 she has been demoted to a traffic cop, her oldest son will not talk to her and almost the whole town has given her the cold shoulder.

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