Criminal comes with the promise of breathing some life into the police procedural along with an interesting format whereby three episodes are devoted to cases in four different countries. It's an intriguing start, and with a decent pedigree of actors the United Kingdom section looked good enough to tempt me to press play. All of the action takes place in the interrogation room, the corridor outside it or in the viewing room next door, all designed in an idiosyncratic way that seems... unlikely, certainly for a British police station. Nevertheless, it starts out tightly with (a very downbeat and understated) David Tennant playing a doctor accused of raping and killing his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. He's determined, on his solicitor's advice, to answer 'no comment' to every question put to him and we see that the interrogators have only a limited time to charge him.
It sounds exciting, and for a while it is; it's tense and reasonably well-acted, but at the end of the episode it felt undercooked. There was something missing. It was as if someone tried to come up with a show based entirely on the interrogation scenes in Line of Duty but missed out on any of the context and technique that make those so compelling. Nicholas Pinnock is always good value with a stare that could bore a hole in concrete, but the different elements never quite come together in a satisfying way.
I thought it was a very intense and therefore very intriguing first procedural, and the acting was great! I have absolutely no interest in the love affairs of the cast just yet , so it was a little bit of a drag to finish on that.
I was intrigued by the concept of this show, but while the first episode wasn't atrocious, I'm gonna pass on the rest. The idea of the entire story being told in an interrogation room ends up limiting the dramatic possibilities way too much for my tastes. Think about it: there's no chance the person being interrogated is innocent, because then you have no episode. So we're left with guilty people, and the only tension we get is whether they'll confess or not, which we know will happen because otherwise the bad guys win.
And honestly, if this first episode is any illustration of the overall quality of the rest, I'm not interested. The episode is built as if they're racing against the clock and brilliantly lure Edgar into revealing a significant detail, but... the key detail is the patterns of the trunk mat on the victim's cast. A detail which they had from the get-go and for which they didn't need Edgar's admission to implicate him!
So yeah, no. Pass for me. Nice try, but the concept doesn't carry the show at all.
The first episode was so terribly boring I've decided not to carry on
This feels like someone was trying to write a acting exercise but with continuity... Meh
Shout by caitlinBlockedParent2019-09-21T06:26:44Z
I was excited to watch this show, but felt that it really fell flat in this first episode. The intensity was there and I found myself interested at some points, but it was fairly predictable and not quite unique. I also found it difficult to connect with any of the characters. I did not feel even close to invested in any of them and therefore decided to stop after one episode.