Jenna Coleman on BBC's The Jetty filmed in Todmorden, Ripponden and Sowerby Bridge

But new BBC One crime series The Jetty aims to do something slightly less conventional and is as much a coming-of-age post-Me Too story as a crime thriller, and asks big questions about sexual morality and issues of consent.

Doctor Who actress Jenna Coleman plays Detective Ember Manning, who must work out how the blaze is linked to a podcast journalist who was investigating the 17-year-old missing person cold case, and to a local sex offender who is operating in the area.

As she starts to unravel the connections between the cases, she is forced to reflect upon her own past and teenage years and question whether some of the things she thought were normal back then actually were.

Coleman, 38, who made her acting debut in soaps but shot to fame in the ITV period drama Victoria, before taking on the role of Clara in Doctor Who, had previously veered away from crime dramas such as this one, but says The Jetty felt different.

“I think my reluctance in the past was, as much as I love detective thrillers, I think sometimes what happens is you become a vehicle to turn the cogs of the story,” she says thoughtfully.

“Whereas this just felt, from the first read of the first page, I knew who Ember was as a human first. It felt very much like a human and emotional story as much as it was a detective thriller, and the two things co-existing together. So that was what completely hooked me. And also the beauty and the themes – the water, subconscious trauma, blurred boundaries, sexual politics, nostalgia, memories – it felt so dense and rich.

“Some of the scenes that I love the most are Ember with her daughter and Ember with her mother, and looking at that kind of generational relationship.

“Being on set it was all women and it was great. It was great, it always felt like a very feminine story right from the origin.”

Directed by Marialy Rivas, the series – set in Lancashire but partly filmed at Todmorden High School, in Ripponden and Sowerby Bridge in Calderdale, West Yorkshire – is created and written by playwright Cat Jones. She was loosely inspired in part by her own experiences as a teenager, when some of her friends became involved with older men, and who now hopes to do justice to the classics of the detective genre, while adding her own spin.

“I love detective dramas and I think audiences are fascinated by them because we’re fascinated by ourselves and they’re a great way of exploring human behaviour,” Jones says.

“I think the really interesting ones are about presenting characters who aren’t heroes or villains, but just complex, flawed characters making choices, and our job as the audience is to watch those choices.

“When I’m watching those shows, and they do it well, I’m sitting there going, ‘Well, this behaviour is really extreme, and hopefully I’m not capable of that, but maybe I’m capable of a version of it, or the impulse behind it, and maybe the person next to me on the sofa is too.’

“That could be really, really dark but the thing about the detective drama is that you have the detective and however flawed or compromised they are, they’re also the light. They’re the thing that reminds us that it is possible to kind of place order on chaos and resist our worst instincts. I think there’s something ultimately hopeful about that. It’s a genre I love and I hope we’ve done it justice.”

But Jones also hopes to do justice to the real stories of women who have suffered abuse.

“I think that is really important, but it’s also really important to me that it’s not a show in which the women are good and the men are bad,” she says. “I hope that the characters are all complex and flawed and making good and bad choices and either learning from those things or not.

“The women are as flawed and complex as the men, and I think with very few exceptions I don’t think there are any characters in the show that aren’t redeemable in some way, there are no heroes or villains, I hope.

“So the female characters are very important to me, but all the characters are important to me, so I hope it’s not alienating and simplistic.

“How Ember goes about solving the case was always going to be very intertwined with her looking at her own life and her own past, which I hope makes it feel quite visceral and like you’re right at the heart of the case.

“It was always the plan that she’s investigating herself, as much as the things that are going on in her town, and it keeps Ember right at the heart of it, rather than imposing a case upon her.”

Explore Yorkshire’s rich arts and culture scene with our dedicated newsletter

Indeed the centrality of Ember’s flaws and complexities was one of the things Coleman found the most compelling about taking part in the show.

“It made the job so much more interesting and also easier,” she says. “There are certain scenes where she could bounce off in so many different directions.

“The flaws are the thing that I love about her the most. It’s her Achilles heel, it’s her pig-headedness and her stubbornness and impatience that is driving the case, and she is unable to do anything but charge forward, but at the same time unravelling her whole past. It’s such an interesting push-pull for a character.”

All episodes of The Jetty are on BBC iPlayer now.