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.
Review by DeletedBlockedParent2019-09-20T22:09:42Z
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.