Return to Paradise review: This latest entry to the Paraverse will give you a distinct sense of deja vu

This week saw the launch of the third iteration of the long-running BBC show as Return to Paradise (BBC1, Fri, 8pm) hit our screens.

We've had the original, set in a picturesque corner of the Caribbean, then came Beyond Paradise, set in a picturesque corner of the West Country and now Return is set in a picturesque corner of Australia.

Dolphin Cove is the kind of place which only exists in television dramas – the kind of place which has breath-taking scenery, a thriving tourism industry, successful businesses which make people independently wealthy and the highest murder rate in the country.

Into this Antipodean paradise arrives DI Mackenzie Clarke (Anna Samson), returning to her childhood home for the first time in six years to visit her mother.

Mackenzie, you see, has a reason for not wanting to be in Dolphin Cove, reasons that involve hunky forensic pathologist Glenn (Tai Hara) – a man who spends more time with his shirt off than on.

She jilted him at the altar and fled to London to join the Metropolitan Police, which leads to a certain level of friction with the local police chief, who happens to be Glenn's mother and Mackenzie's ex future mother-in-law.

This being the – if you will – 'Paraverse', grudges rarely seem to be carried for long, and quicker than you can say “crime scene” Mackenzie has been co-opted into the local force to solve the murder of local estate agent Stuart Granger.

Granger has been – literally – stabbed in the back, the only problem being that he somehow got out of a house which had been locked from the inside.

If this sounds like an episode of the original series, that's no surprise. And there are no surprises in Return to Paradise.

It sticks to the formula slavishly.

There are four suspects, each of which are interviewed in turn. There are blue-tinged flashbacks to the moments before the murder. There are photos pinned up on a board, which the detectives return every now and again to remind the viewers who's who. And there is a gallery of colourful supporting characters.

Mackenzie, for example, is helped – and hindered – by an English junior detective called Colin (Lloyd Griffith), whose only role is to get things wrong and thus prove just how right Mackenzie is.

And there's Reggie (Celia Ireland), who is Mackenzie's former teacher and now volunteers at the police station. Her most useful skill seems to be a photographic memory of everyone she taught and what they were like.

Most importantly, the crime is solved and the perpetrator revealed when Mackenzie calls all the suspects together and pieces together the case in front of their goggling eyes.

The problem is, Return to Paradise sticks rather too close the original template, and leaves you feeling you've seen it all before.

The only point of difference is having a female lead, but Mackenzie is not someone you instantly warm to – she's painted as brusque, work-focused to the exclusion of everything else and dismissive of the small town where she grew up.

She is, mercifully, shorn of the tics which substituted for character in the original series - the aversion to extreme heat, the allergies, the clumsiness – but you hope she'll mellow as the series go on, otherwise you'll wonder why they don't just send her back to London.

If there are further entries to the Paraverse – and like our own solar system, it seems to be constantly expanding – you have to hope they do something different with it.

Otherwise we'll be getting para-bored with a bad case of para-fatigue.