Seaton Carew is a quiet coastal town in north-east England, part of the port town of Hartlepool.

The facades on The Cliff, made famous by the return of the presumed-dead John Darwin in December 2007, look different in reality than they do in the ITV series The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe.

And the private life of the man known to the British public as "The Canoe Man" may not always have been as series creator Chris Lang ("Unforgotten") would have us believe.

But as far as the facades are concerned: they were filmed a few kilometers further north at the Headland breakwater and therefore look great in the rainy gray of the anonymous melancholics.

And for the retelling of this bold story, which made headlines in England, Lang studied the memoirs of the "Canoe Widow" Anne Darwin, in addition to court records, police reports, press articles and the manuscript of a journalistic book by David Leigh.

So, as he explains on his website, all he had to do was use a certain amount of imagination.

Why is?

About an accident that the heavily indebted Briton John Darwin (Eddie Marsan from "Mr. May and the Whispers of Eternity") fakes in the spring of 2002 on the North Sea off Seaton Carew.

About the life insurance that his wife Anne (Monica Dolan) then tries to get hold of.

His wife perishes mentally as an accomplice

And above all about fatal loyalty.

Because "The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe" is not a bizarre crook comedy about an inconspicuous couple.

There are funny scenes that British series always shake off the wrist, and Anne's monologue as the narrator is not without fun.

But the reserved woman, who already suffered under her domineering husband when the couple bought two houses to rent rooms in 2000, as an accomplice perishes emotionally as the story unfolds.

For years she has to fool her adult children Mark (Mark Stanley) and Anthony (Dominic Applewhite) into believing that their father is dead - although the lively John hides in a neighboring apartment, which can be reached via Anne's closet, and works on his relationship-internal image as a manipulative unsympathetic.

The deeper we delve into the story, the more watchable The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe becomes as a marital drama.

Director Richard Laxton also works out the contradictions that make up Anne's behavior with a sure instinct for credible weighting.

The shy Anne, kept docile with psychological tricks and traditional role allocation, can hardly stand her husband and her own compliance.

She doesn't want any of that, but she can't get out of the act.

And yet she occasionally succumbs to the illusion that with life insurance money and a new life in Panama, her marriage could be happy again and John the Old could be.

A John, whom one likes to listen to again while dreaming and planning, without despairingly thinking about his overconfidence, his eternal failure with announcement, his narcissistic personality disorder.

The husband promises it will all be over in a few weeks, before pushing his old red canoe across the beach at Seaton Carew.

It will be five years, of which the precisely cast series, with the exception of an intro, which takes place in Panama in 2007 and floods impatient viewers with adrenaline, tells chronologically and without any quirks.

In the end, it happened as it had to: The Darwins' edifice of lies is brought down by two careless little things, and in the rubble Anne almost loses those who mean everything to her: the betrayed children.

The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe may be a true crime story with no murder and no body.

But it is not a story without victims.

The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe

is on sale on Maganta TV.