Richard Armitage leads the winter ITV series Winter as Dr Ethan Winter, a forensic pathologist who solves crimes by reading bodies. The six-part ITV police procedural is set in Bristol and begins with a young woman found in a freezer lorry.
That opening case sits beside a decade-old wound: Ethan’s fiancee was murdered a decade ago, and the review treats that loss as the series’ narrative backbone. For viewers, that means each episode has a self-contained crime while the broader mystery keeps pulling the story back to Ethan himself.
Armitage and Scholey in Bristol
Richard Armitage plays Ethan as a maverick, a wildcard and a lone wolf who will not play by the rules, and the review repeatedly returns to him pacing silently around a Bristol flat. He is also described as one of the greatest forensic pathologists of his generation, which gives the character enough authority to drive the inquiry without turning him into a standard police lead.
Annabel Scholey plays DI Lauren Bell, who has recently moved to Bristol after a mysteriously self-curtailed career with the Met. Jamie Kenna appears as DS Ellis Daldry, and the pair give the investigation its police-side pressure while Ethan works outside the normal chain of command.
Winter and the dead fiancee
The review says Ethan’s malaise may be connected to the murder of his fiancee a decade ago, and that unresolved loss keeps the series from becoming a routine procedural. It also makes the show’s central mechanics clearer: the cases can close, but the private motive keeps reopening.
One line from the review captures the character’s method neatly: DS Ellis Daldry says Ethan can “read a body like other people read a book.” That idea, more than any chase or interrogation, is what the series is selling — a specialist eye at work inside a crime story that is still carrying unfinished business.
Grim case, sharp writing
The review is not entirely deferential. It describes the script as “a thing of string and glue,” even while calling the dead fiancee material gripping and the production values high. That split matters because it suggests Winter is strongest when it sticks to the emotional and forensic mechanics rather than leaning on broad procedural formula.
Armitage’s role is the reason to watch. Winter is built to let him move between the freezer-lorry death, the Bristol setting and the old fiancee case without turning the show into a one-note detective drama, and the remaining episodes now have to prove that the balance can hold.
