Line of Duty

Having made no effort to catch Jed Mercurio’s previous antiseptic offerings ‘Bodies’ and ‘Cardiac Arrest’, we came to this with only the hope of something less self-conscious than ‘The Shadow Line’ and less run-of-the-mill than almost every other cop show.

The first of five episodes set up some nice ambiguities.  If none of the characters are hugely sympathetic, so far, then they’re not outright bad-guy villains either, just people making choices according to circumstance.  Wonderful Lennie James is DCI Tony Gates, whose soaring crime clear-up rate brings him under suspicion of cherry-picking easy-win cases.  DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston), whose moral compass points so truly to north he probably can’t sit down, is assigned to Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar) to investigate.  DC Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) meanwhile has succeeded in joining Gates’s team undercover.  Whether guilty or innocent of the above, Gates is compromised: he has a wife (Kate Ashfield) and children, as well as a mistress (Gina McKee) who has dragged him into covering up her involvement in a hit-and-run that may have been deliberate.

Nothing to dislike so far.  (Neil Morrissey as a sleazy cop may just be inspired casting.)  The style is background to the script and action, for once, and it’s a promising premise to look at the system of modern policing as something that allows or even encourages foul play.

Silk

Best described as 'solid'.  One of those not-great-not-terrible legal dramas with a better cast than it deserves.  Really don't understand the praise this has garnered, although the second series which finishes tonight has been better than the first.  The omission of the irritating pupils was a good move, ditto the single-career-woman-in-mid-life-pregnancy story.


More moral dilemmas with slightly less predictable turnouts and this would be a cut above.  And perhaps less of the insufferable Clive's bedroom antics.

Mad Men Series 5 - some spoilers

Mad Men - five series down, two to go.  Instead of reviewing storylines, we thought it was probably easier to see how each of the characters had developed over the course of this series.  

Don - As the lynchpin of the show Don has had a good series.  Free from Betty, he's been reasonably happy with - aka faithful to - Megan, and it's all been pretty much believable.  The only negatives are the occasional visions, which seem to be out of sync with the more-or-less natural tone of the rest of the show.  Less of those please!

Roger - Also a good series.  As a functioning alcoholic (with seemingly everlasting finances) we can buy him experimenting with LSD and realising his latest marriage was a leap in the dark that hasn't worked out.

Bert - Bert hasn't appeared much, but he's also been true to his character.   He told Don to 'get back to work' after lots of Megan distractions, and in fact he'd have done that earlier.

Lane - The series has a habit of making the male characters sleazy if it doesn't know what to do with them.  (See below!)  This series we got Sleazy Lane at the beginning, but then better storylines developed.  Halfway through we felt sorry for Jared Harris, arguably the best actor in the show, getting such a poor deal, but he had some great scenes later on.  RIP.

Pete - Sleazy Pete! Pete is a great character, and very believable as a young, thrusting ad man, but the show doesn't really know what do do with him outside work.  Hence Sleazy Pete.

Peggy - Finally she got another job.  As with Pete, they really don't know what to do with Peggy outside (& maybe inside) the office.  Ali has had a gripe with this since MM began.  Why should the nominally go-ahead character have such uninspiring stories?  Because most of the writers are male and don't know what to do with her, or understand her?  Could Peggy either go or have some kind of proper, full series story arc?

Megan - It (kind of) came good in the end, but Megan has the potential to turn into another Betty dramatically, in that she'll drag the show down whenever she appears.

Joan - We wondered midway through, but Joan ended up with the sort of full series story arc that Peggy needs.  She also arguably had the best single episode story too (the pitch) and we'd put money on her becoming an even more important character in the remaining series.

Fabulous cast, strong and intelligent writing.  Bring on Series 6!

True Love

'Mad Men' is the honourable exception to our Sky avoidance.  Or more accurately, it's the only thing non-terrestrial and non-freeview that we bother to tune in for or tape.  Hence the recent silence, since it's the only channel featuring anything that hasn't been shown 58 times already.  With the summer lull upon us, the schedules are full of cheap stuff, like dud Jubilee coverage and Olympics promos.  We were hoping for a pleasant diversion in bite-sized chunks, set in the faded, tawdry splendour of Margate.  The trailer promised much, not least a starry cast, and on this at least it's delivered.

Admittedly, we are only one down with four still to go, but on the strength of the first story, featuring David Tennant, Joanne Froggatt and Vicky McClure, it's going to be a struggle.  Hurrah for scriptwriters.  Hurrah for Mike Leigh for coaxing decent dialogue via workshopping and improvisation.  Either would have been welcome here, but instead we got actors with rabbit-in-headlights expressions, obviously uncomfortable at being given banal storylines and having to come up with lines on the spot.  Needless to say, they conveyed love by saying "I love you" and "I love you too", and on unexpectedly bumping into an old acquaintance they say, "Well this is..." and "Yeah, yeah, it's...yeah."  It was like watching well-known actors appearing in something like TOWIE.  What's worse, the advance publicity suggests that the next four episodes will be essentially the same story (person either bereft or in relationship fancies alternative) with slightly tweaked scenarios.  Sad to say, but there were also some likely TWNH moments: would Serena really fly over from Canada to look up old flame Nick, rather than attempting, initially, to find and friend him on Facebook?  Would Nick be so hung up on her that he jumps straight into an affair that he hides from his wife but no-one else?  Would said wife be so quick to forgive him?

Good on the actors for being game, and all that, and good old Margate for being a better backdrop than most would credit, but slight stories and even slighter lines make an extremely underwhelming watch.

White Heat...

... seemed to finish with a whimper.  Was anyone other than Ali still watching?  Not in the league of 'Our Friends...' and definitely not event television.  Among the many possible reasons, two stand out: the casting of actors who bore very little resemblance to their younger selves and the fact that most of the drama seemed to arise from personal circumstances rather than the a-changin' times.  Ironically, the rather clumsy attempts to ground each episode in current events, music etc. took attention away from the development of the characters and their friendships, making it hard to care about them, or believe in their supposedly deep and lasting ties.

The Bridge

If you were planning a trip to Scandinavia this year, you'd be forgiven for having second thoughts.  The TV and film depictions only lend credence to the current news stories of a cold-blooded killer, featuring death, dismemberment, loners and Machiavellian double-crossing within the establishment.  'The Bridge' doesn't break the mould.  If anything it ups the ante a notch or two with a macabre double murder and some very dubious characters in just the first episode.

So far, it feels more akin to the violent and explicit 'Spiral' than its compatriots, with the necessary addition of dark-washed shots, rain and more rain.  It's gripping, or at least has hooks enough to keep an audience of BBC4 viewers watching episodes three and four next week (not least a cameo from a familiar face from the original 'Killing').

Where we may be in the minority is our unease about the main character of Saga.  She's almost a parody of Sarah Lund, a sort of Jennifer Saunders version.  She's not just terse, but silent or monosyllabic, and is so much at sea with emotions that she comes across as odd to everyone who meets her.  No-one has said the 'a' word, but she clearly lacks social skills and struggles to read faces and body language, taking words at their literal meaning.  Would anyone like this make a good detective?  She may be thorough, detailed and even a lateral thinker, but she'd surely be hopeless at solving a crime of passion?  Just as well that this is shaping up to be a misplaced-social-justice/abused person on ritual crusade kind of case, so she might stand some chance, but this misses the humanising core of 'The Killing', both series of which have so far been about family, duty and relationships.  Still less is it like 'Borgen', one of the most enjoyable and intelligent series of recent years.

We gave up with 'Those Who Kill' because its Danish credentials weren't enough.  And changing tops frequently and in public is no substitute for the amazing self-mending Lund jumper.

The Syndicate, Part Two

This time there was no snoozing.  Kay Mellor hasn't gone far outside her safety net here, with her working class characters struggling through a calamitous situation, here a small supermarket winning big on the lottery.  Stuart (Matthew McNulty) was so nagged by his spendthrift wife and desperate prior to the win that his collusion in the robbery is likely to cost him the money and his family, and has already put Bob (Tim Spall) in hospital.

It's more cosy than gritty, and the comedy-drama genre sits oddly with the life-changing scenario and sometimes abrasive script, but as usual the cast do great stuff with what they're given and last night's had a fun take on 'Pretty Woman' with Denise (Lorraine Bruce) and sassy single mother Leanne (Joanna Page) shopping for clothes on a very big budget.  The scenes between Denise and estranged husband Dave (Wayne Foskett) alone were worth tuning in for.  Or re-tuning.  Or whatever we're all supposed to do with digital switchover this month.

Talking of Mr Foskett, how nice to see him onscreen again - a star ever since playing Elvis Simcock, David Thewlis's sulky brother in 'A Bit of a Do' back in the late 80s, and criminally underused.