Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Informer’ On Amazon Prime, Where A Young Man Becomes A Mole Against His Will

British spy and espionage shows depend heavily on the tics and foibles of the agents and officers trying to catch terrorists. Informer on Amazon is no different. But when you add the perspective of the person who gets flipped to be an informant, then things get more interesting. Read on to find out more…

INFORMER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man on a commuter train finds that a woman has left her cell phone behind, and he tracks her down to a cafe to return it. Just then, a gunman enters the cafe, and the man gets a gunshot to the chest.

The Gist: We cut to an inquest about the attack, where the young man got killed. A counter-terrorism agent named Gabe Waters (Paddy Considine) testifies — off the record — that he knows the gunman.

Cut to a year earlier. Raza Shar (Nabhaan Rizwan) is a young man who has a steady job and lives with his family in East London. He dabbles in pills and other drugs but for the most part is a law-abiding citizen. But he and his parents know what it’s like in London for Pakistanis — and people with his skin color in general — and is always careful, even remembering the line “Don’t freak, I’m Sikh” when confronted with people who are Islamophobes.

After a night with his girlfriend, she overdoes things and he has to take her to the emergency room, where he’s arrested for possession, and he’s pretty sure it’s because he was profiled.

Meantime, Detective Sargent Waters, part of the Metropolitan Police’s Counter-Terrorism Special Unit (CTSU) is trying to find out why a bigwig terrorist made a visit to London. He gets a new partner, DC Holly Morten (Bel Powley), who is pretty aggressive and creative in the way she flushes out people to make into informants. Walters pumps one of his riskier informants, Yousef Hassan (Abubakar Salim) for info on the terrorist bigwig’s visit; Yousef wants to ensure his brother, who just got pinched for possession, is sprung from jail with the charges dropped.

The brother just happens to be in holding with Raza, who thinks he’s getting sprung when Waters and Morten try to flip him into being an informant with a threat to put him away with an intent to distribute charge. He refuses, and Morten finds another way… threatening his stepmother, who’s undocumented, with deportation. In the meantime, Yousef disappears, putting more pressure on Waters’ investigation.

Our Take: Informer, created by Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani (Sam Mendes is one of the executive producers), is one of those shows that has to grab you from the first episode in order to make you want to see more. The first episode kind of grabs you, maybe with one hand, giving you openings to wriggle away from its grasp and not watch any more than that first episode.

Because of the first scene of the first episode, we have an idea where this is going, with Raza getting deeper and deeper into a world that he didn’t ever want to be in, simply because the CTSU has goods on his stepmother. Raza’s a good kid who likely only got this fate because he’s brown, which is an interesting aspect of the show. But getting there may be a slog, and that’s our main issue with this show.

Considine plays Waters as your standard-grade, morally conflicted law enforcement officer who takes risks and has skeletons in his closet. It’s Powley’s character, Holly Morten, that holds more interest with us. She might also be morally and ethically compromised, but in a different, more Machiavellian way. Her move to get Raza to flip by threatening his stepmother was ingenious and scary all at once, and Powley plays Morten like she’s thinking two steps ahead of everyone else at all times. But does that make her a good guy or a villain? That’ll be the most intriguing thing to examine as we go forward.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: After being flipped into the informant’s program, Raza returns home; his stepmother has been sleeping on the couch waiting for him. He then goes to his balcony to see that the mouse he put a flowerpot over before he got arrested is dead now. He likely feels as trapped as that mouse did.

Sleeper Star: Sunetra Sarker is equally tough and loving as Raza’s stepmother. And, considering her status is at stake, we’ll see more of her going forward.

Most Pilot-y Line: Raza talks to a bunch of young artists in a loft he’s interested in living in, and when he sees that a pic of his East London neighborhood, including him in the background, is called “Young Radicals” he steals one of the resident’s cameras and takes a selfie of him giving the finger. The racism is a bit over the top, but Raza stealing the camera undercuts his “good guy” narrative a bit.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Informer feels like a good weekend binge, but something that’s not intense enough to watch more slowly than that.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Informer on Prime Video