Jed Mercurio’s anti-corruption thriller makes interview rooms, acronyms and paperwork gripping, and hands Lennie James, Keeley Hawes and Thandiwe Newton parts they tear into. The first three series are exceptional; the later ones pile on twists until the plot creaks.
Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty began on 26 June 2012 as a five-part series about a police unit whose job is to investigate other police officers. The unit is AC-12, and the show’s bet is that a detective caught lying about his paperwork is more frightening than a criminal caught with a gun. Each episode runs an hour and carries a 15, and the first three series are about as good as British crime television has been.
The signature scene is the interview. Somebody is walked into a glass-walled room, a recorder beeps, and Ted Hastings, Steve Arnott and Kate Fleming read documents aloud for as long as the scene needs, which can be twenty minutes. Mercurio, who writes the series, has grasped that a person’s own words on a form are the tightest trap there is, and the directors, John Strickland, Douglas Mackinnon, Daniel Nettheim and Mercurio himself among them, hold on faces and let the words do the work. The cinematographers across the run, Ruairí O’Brien, Tim Palmer, Peter Robertson and Stephen Murphy, shoot the offices in the flat grey of a real open-plan building, strip lights and vertical blinds, and keep the wider, darker frames for the streets. Maggie Donnelly puts everyone in the same dark suits and lanyards, so a bent officer is indistinguishable from a straight one until he opens his mouth.
Each series hands its guest lead a part to tear into, and three of them are remarkable. Lennie James gives Tony Gates the ease of a man who has always been the cleverest officer in any building he walks into and has just met the paperwork; he is charming, good at his job and compromised a little more each episode, and James never asks to be liked. Keeley Hawes’s Lindsay Denton is a tired woman in a cardigan whose every ‘no comment’ lands like a slap, and we changed our minds about her four times in six episodes. Thandiwe Newton’s Roz Huntley is the coldest of the three, a DCI defending a case she knows is rotten with the precision of someone who has read the rulebook more closely than the people prosecuting her.
The regulars are a quieter pleasure. Martin Compston’s Arnott is a small, stubborn man in a waistcoat who is right slightly too often for his own good. Vicky McClure’s Fleming goes undercover in a new squad each series, and McClure plays her as a woman who is good at going unnoticed. Adrian Dunbar’s Hastings starts as a straight-backed superintendent with a saying for every occasion and ends up something closer to a folk hero, which the show enjoys more than it should.
We should own the effect. During one interview in series 2, Denton on one side of the table and Hastings on the other, we realised we had been leaning forward for several minutes and breathing badly, and nothing on screen had moved but a mouth and a stack of paper. Television rarely does that with two faces and a script. A set piece involving a raid on a flat had us shouting at the screen, which we do not do often and did not do with dignity.
The faults grow with the success. Mercurio’s plotting, tight over five episodes, sprawls over six and seven, and the later series lean on a shadowy network of corrupt officers, the whiteboards filling with photographs and arrows. The ambushes and shoot-outs, competent early on, arrive so often and are cut so fast that we sometimes lost who was firing at whom. People we had followed for years are removed in ways arranged for shock rather than earned, and the final series ends on a note that left a great many viewers cross. We were among them, and we will not say why.
Against the genre’s own standards it stands high. Between the Lines did the anti-corruption unit in the 1990s and did it more soberly, and Prime Suspect had the interview room first, but neither made the paperwork itself the weapon. The reviews in 2012 were respectful rather than excited, and the show has since outgrown them.
Start at the beginning, with the five episodes of series 1, and do not skip ahead to the famous later runs; the interviews only bite if you have sat through the forms. Then stop wherever the whiteboards start to look silly. For us that was somewhere in series 5, though the interview rooms stayed good to the end.
