In a sentenceThe dialogue should have been arrested; Nesbitt talks his way past it every week
London, 2001. DS Tommy Murphy (James Nesbitt) is an Irish detective sergeant working for the London police, used for the jobs nobody else wants: going in alone, under another name, among people the force cannot otherwise reach. His superiors, DI Annie Guthrie (Claudia Harrison) and DCS Warren (Francis Magee), want results and would rather not know how he gets them. DC Alan Carter (Del Synnott) is the colleague who has to watch his back from the outside. The first case puts him alongside Drew Johnstone (Liam Cunningham), a man with money, muscle and good reason to check a stranger’s story, and Murphy has to keep the lie standing long enough to find what Johnstone is hiding. What he wants is the truth of one case. What stands in the way is that one wrong word ends him.
James Nesbitt’s undercover Irish detective is the whole show, and he is good enough to be most of one. The cases hold, the London is drab in the right way, and the dialogue keeps saying what better scripts would let the faces say.
Colin Bateman created Murphy’s Law for James Nesbitt, and it shows in every scene. Nesbitt plays DS Tommy Murphy, an Irish detective in London who is sent in under a false name wherever a face the villains have not seen is needed. The tagline promises a maverick, and the show delivers one in the old sense: he drinks, he answers back, he gets results his superiors would rather not examine. Over five series of hour-long episodes between 2001 and 2007, that is the whole proposition. It is a decent one, carried by its lead a good deal further than the writing deserves.
Nesbitt is the reason to watch and the reason it works at all. He talks the way the character lives, fast and amused and half a step ahead, and when Murphy is bluffing a man who could kill him the grin is doing the work. We found ourselves grinning along with him in a scene we knew to be absurd, a hard man taking a stranger’s word on nothing but charm, and we were a little annoyed with ourselves afterwards. It is a star performance in a show that is otherwise a police procedural, and it exposes the procedural.
The dialogue is the fault, and it is not a small one. Ten writers are credited across the run, Bateman among them, with Tony McHale, Allan Cubitt and Russell Lewis also on the list, and they share a habit of having people say exactly what they are. Villains announce their intentions. Colleagues state the stakes. Claudia Harrison’s DI Annie Guthrie and Francis Magee’s DCS Warren exist mostly to send Murphy in and then tell him off for the manner in which he came out, and Del Synnott’s DC Alan Carter is the loyal one who worries. None of them is given a line we would repeat. The plots are better than the lines: tight, nasty and resolved on time, and we were caught by more than one of them while wincing at what was being said.
Nine directors share the episodes, Peter Lydon, Colm McCarthy and Brian Kirk among them, and the look stays consistent: lock-ups, pubs, flats with the curtains drawn, a London of grey afternoons rather than lit skylines. Edmund Butt’s music does a lot of pushing, a low pulse under anything that might be tense, and we wished more than once that it would trust the scene. Liam Cunningham, as Drew Johnstone, gives the first case a proper opponent, a man who listens before he speaks, which in this show makes him unusual. Owen Teale and Mark Womack, later on, do similar work in similar silences.
The show changes shape as it goes. The first series is five hours of cases; the second and third run to six each, and the fourth and fifth are down to three apiece. Murphy is a man who lies for a living, and the show is at its best when it lets a lie stand long enough to cost him something, rather than wrapping it up by the closing credits.
The only review we have read from its first broadcast was harsh, scoring it low and blaming the dialogue, which is fair, and finding Nesbitt watchable, which is also fair. We think it undervalued how much of the show he holds up on his own. The writing is tired; the man saying it is not.
If undercover cop stories are your genre, this is a decent one, and Nesbitt is worth the evening. If they are not, nothing here will change your mind, and the first episode will tell you so inside twenty minutes.
McLean finds the drama ultimately unsuccessful, chiefly because its dialogue is so clichéd and alienating. He praises the gripping plot and James Nesbitt’s watchable central performance.
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The Fall · not reviewed yetAllan Cubitt again, with the dialogue pared back and the menace allowed to breathe.
CrackerA damaged Celt talking his way through rooms full of police, written with real teeth.
Between the Lines · not reviewed yetBritish police procedural where the villains and the superiors are often the same people.
The Wire · not reviewed yetThe undercover game played slowly, from both sides, over a whole city.
Spiral · not reviewed yetParis cops bending rules under tired light; nobody explains their plan to anyone.
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