Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Line of Duty opens with an anti-terrorism sting gone horribly wrong.
Scores of heavy-armed London officers storm a council estate, closing in on a terrorist’s flat. They nervously wait for one officer on the ground, Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) to give the official go ahead. He confirms the apartment number, “Flat 56,” and gives the signal. As the cops break down the door, they gun the armed terrorist down. The heart-wrenching twist, though, is he wasn’t a Muslim terrorist wearing a bomb; He was just an immigrant wearing his baby in sling and he was just shot down in front of his screaming wife.
Arnott soon realizes that the cops stormed Flat 59. The “nine” had swung out of place and looked like a “six.” It’s a mistake. It’s an awful, violent, cruel mistake that claims a life.
The officers responsible for the mistake are told that they are going to agree on a story that implies the victim was belligerent. Arnott doesn’t want to fall in line. Guilt propels him to accept a transfer to AC-12, an anti-corruption unit. Line of Duty isn’t a show about the fight against terrorism, you see. It’s a show about cops going after their fellow cops.
Line of Duty seems to be the biggest British show no one in America knows about. The first season was BBC Two’s biggest hit in literally a decade and the last season drew Westworld‘s Thandie Newton in to play a major role. It’s practically a phenomenon over there (that I only cottoned to when I saw star Vicky McClure promoting the Season Four finale on The Graham Norton Show, Britain’s splashiest and most star-studded talk show). Why is Line of Duty such a behemoth over there? Because it really is phenomenal. It may even be the best cop show of the 21st century.
Line of Duty is raw and gritty, but its heft comes from its humanity. Season One follows Arnott’s first big case in AC-12: investigating Detective Chief Inspector Anthony Gates (Lennie James). Gates is the overwhelming star of the London police force. He’s smart, quick, charming, and has repeatedly claimed the most arrests. However, he’s been accused of “laddering,” i.e. cherry-picking easy, sexy cases to boost his profile. That’s what Arnott and his new co-workers have to dig into. Complicating things? Well, Gates is a black officer, and charges of race-based jealousy whiff around the investigation. (Line of Duty does not pretend we live in a politically correct utopia, but it does use our very modern insecurity about political correctness as a font of tension.)
What Arnott, his new boss, Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar), and their associates don’t know off the bat is that the seemingly perfect — and very married — Gates has been having an affair with a well-off woman named Jackie Laverty (Gina McKee). The breadth of their torrid romance is fed to us piecemeal, as all the great twists in this show are. This personal indiscretion invades Gates’ professional life when he helps bail Laverty out of a drunk driving arrest, only to later discover that she killed her accountant in a hit and run. Gates didn’t mean to break the rules, but he’s too far in, and too emotionally compromised, to stay clean. The laddering investigation aside, Gates seems screwed.
The show spirals around the Gates case like it’s the eye of a hurricane. Other investigations, other officers, and other unfortunate mistakes swirl around and around this larger season-long case erupting in drama. It would be tempting to say that Line of Duty exposes the seedy underbelly of law enforcement. That’s a simplistic look at what’s being explored here that supposes that there are good cops and bad cops and nothing in between. Morality is far more complicated than that. Good people do bad things and bad people do good things. It’s why, even though the opening scene doesn’t seem directly connected to the rest of the show, it means everything. Line of Duty shows us the all-too-human side of law enforcement — the one that finds itself compromised not by some fetid evil, but honest and emotional mistakes. Though, trust me, evil also gets its due here. This show is full of vile twists and turns.
You can catch all four seasons of Line of Duty — and each season focuses on a new AC-12 suspect — on Hulu.
