Criminal Record: Masterful leads, maddening plot

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This article was published 20/01/2024 (964 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As charges of systemic racism and brutality drive real-world demands for police reform, there have been parallel pop-culture calls for changes in police shows. For many viewers, the longstanding Law & Order model — with flawed but doggedly decent detectives and prosecutors reliably delivering justice in under an hour — now seems outdated.

Criminal Record (now streaming on Apple TV+) is clearly trying to be a new kind of cop show. This eight-episode limited series stars Cush Jumbo (The Good Wife) and Peter Capaldi (Doctor Who, The Thick of It) as two London police officers. Their department’s official line is that “root and branch” reform will result in “a modern police service worthy of this great city of ours.”

Slow, raw and at times deliberately frustrating, Criminal Record is trying for a kind of narrative reform, telling new police stories worthy of new audiences.

The opening episode features a terrified woman making an anonymous emergency call from a phone booth. Her violent partner has threatened to kill her, bragging that he’s already killed one woman. As Detective Sergeant June Lenker (Jumbo) looks into the call, the reference to a previous murder leads her to believe a man named Errol Mathis (Tom Moutchi) has been wrongfully convicted for that crime.

Sure enough, there’s something dodgy about Errol’s case, but when June takes her concerns to the officer in charge, Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty (Capaldi), he doesn’t want to know. As June finds her investigation blocked at every point, Daniel stonewalls, manipulates, threatens and cajoles. “We’re all on the same side here,” he tells June. But are they?

We have an ambitious young Black woman facing off against an older white guy on the edge of retirement, intent on preserving his legacy. It might look like a standard cop show setup — idealistic rookie vs. cynical veteran — but it’s complicated by race and gender and by the fact nobody in this series is quite what they first seem.

Criminal Record suffers from some pacing problems and structural issues — there are so many competing plotlines and characters that something’s bound to get lost — but the performances are just breathtakingly good. Jumbo’s June is resolute and tough without falling into any Strong Female Lead stereotypes. Capaldi brings a kind of ravaged, desiccated power to his portrayal of Daniel, who comes off as cautious, calculated but also unexpectedly vulnerable.

Previous shows have looked at police corruption. Line of Duty, which had a wildly popular run in Britain from 2012 to 2021, was absolutely mad about going after “bent coppers.” But in that wonderfully good-bad show, police corruption was a baroque conspiracy masterminded by a shadowy figure called “H.” The show admitted to problems in law enforcement but stopped with the “few rotten apples” theory.

In Criminal Record, corruption isn’t about some grand criminal scheme This show is about entrenched institutional failure, bureaucratic complacency and unexamined assumptions. Corruption coalesces around the gradual, persistent accrual of recognizable human failings: People turn a blind eye. They do a favour for a mate. They go along to get along. They keep their head down. They don’t want trouble. They worry about losing their pensions.

There’s a lot of quid pro quo-ing and mutual butt-covering, a lot of risky justifications around means and ends. The characters’ personal lives bleed into their work.

Most of all there’s the weight of systemic racism. (“It’s in the walls,” as one young officer suggests.) It’s implicated in the Mathis case, but it’s also there in the workplace, taking a daily toll on June. There are racist “jokes,” casually dropped slurs, admonitions not to take offence. A scene in which Daniel painstakingly explains “unconscious bias” to June plays heavily on Capaldi’s talent for satirical comedy.

Criminal Record makes sharp political points, but they play out in human terms, and they’re embodied in two incredible performances. As the two leads move toward a final reckoning, the series becomes even more uncomfortable and difficult, but maybe that’s the kind of cop show we need right now.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca