The Shetland Islands: famous for wee ponies, woolly jumpers and a murder rate to rival a middling British city. At least, you’d assume so if the closest you’ve got to the Scottish archipelago is watching the BBC crime drama Shetland . In reality, there have been just eight murders in the Shetland Islands since 1975, according to Police Scotland statistics . That’s about 1.5 per decade. Not really enough, if the BBC chose realism, to sustain 11 series of rugged, rural whodunnitry.
But when did anything so trifling as a vanishingly low murder rate stop Aunty recommissioning a beloved crime drama? In 2025, Shetland was one of the BBC’s five most-watched drama series.
And this week, Ashley Jensen and Alison O’Donnell are back on the wind-battered beat as detectives Ruth Calder and Alison “Tosh” McIntosh. This’ll be the show’s 11th (ELEVENTH!) series.
So where did we leave off, and where is it going?
Photographer: // BBC Where did Shetland leave off?
Last December, series 10 ended with a murder solved and a colleague in trouble. Arthur Mair – father of one of two young men who drowned in a storm 20 years earlier – had murdered elderly social worker Eadie Tulloch in a classic case of rev...