TV: Line of Duty (2012- )

I've recently added BritBox and Acorn to my roster of streaming services, so I'll likely be catching up with a lot of British TV over the next several months.

This is an excellent crime drama, with six seasons (36 episodes), and a seventh due in 2027. It's streaming in the US on both BritBox and Acorn, though BritBox is missing season 5. That's an important season to the show's overarching story, so if you're a BritBox subscriber, you will want to do a free trial subscription to Acorn in order to binge that season there.

The setting is AC-12, one of several offices in the London police department devoted to investigating cases of possible police corruption. (I think in the US, we'd more often refer to it as an "internal affairs" department.) Our central characters are officers Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) and Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), and their commanding officer Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar). 

Each season features a fourth top-billed actor, playing the officer who's being investigated that season; not all of those actors are well-known in the US, but they're well-known to British TV audiences, and they are surely a big draw. They are, in order: Lennie James, Keeley Hawes, Daniel Mays, Thandiwe Newton (still using the name Thandie back then), Stephen Graham, and Kelly Macdonald.

Over the course of the six seasons, there's also a larger throughline being developed. We come to realize that the individual investigations into these possibly corrupt cops are tied into the same organized crime group, and the officers of AC-12 find themselves in search of the officers even higher up the ladder who are running the network of organized crime and corrupt cops.

There have been a lot of TV shows -- Burn Notice comes to mind -- that have gotten too caught up in an overly elaborate backstory that came to dominate the show, slowly strangling it to death. Line of Duty avoids that peril, doing an impeccable job of balancing each season's primary investigation with the increasing revelations about the identity of the ringleader(s).

The show does everything you want a police drama to do, and does all of it well. Chase scenes and heists are thrilling; office politics feel realistically frustrating; the dangers of the job are neither exaggerated for melodrama nor downplayed to make the audience feel comfortable.

Best of all are the show's interrogation scenes. Dunbar particularly shines in these scenes, especially at the end of a season, when it's all that Hastings can do to keep his anger in check as he faces down the officers who have betrayed their duty to the public, which Hastings views as a sacred trust. And when Hastings himself comes under suspicion in one season, it's a delight to watch him on the other side of the interrogation. (Guest star Anna Maxwell Martin is terrific as the officer tasked with questioning him, a coldly collected bundle of passive aggression, always offering precisely the amount of polite respect that is required of her, but no more than that.)

This is police drama at its finest, and unless you are allergic to the genre -- some are these days, and I can't say I blame them -- it's absolutely worth the time.