Last year the BBC brought us the superb, slightly strange police thriller 'The Shadow Line'; this year, the rather more conventional 'The Line of Duty' has aired. Aspects of this programme are quite good, although it never feels exactly fresh. Anti-corruption units, and undercover agents, have been on our screen before ('Between the Lines' - there's clearly something magnetic about that word 'line' and 'The Ghost Squad') - and some of the conspiracy elements seem both far fetched and perfunctory. Perhaps the greatest problem is that Lennie James' protagonist is a hard man to connect with: an almost-clean copper brought down by a bad friend, he remains a hard man to like, and while he appears to be driven by his own private sense of ethics, this moral code seems completely self-centred - he's torn when he fails to live up to his own expectations of himself, but it's hard to see why we should care. And the portrait of feral kids on the local housing estate seems both lazy, and again relatively loosely connected to the more serious crime in the background - if you're looking for the forensic detail of 'The Wire', you won't find it here. None of this actually makes for a bad series - it does all the standard things you expect a show of this sort to do reasonably well, but it doesn't add much you won't have seen before.
Review of Line of Duty
