The first season of the British cop thriller Criminal Record on Apple TV boasted a fine cast, led by Cush Jumbo and Peter Capaldi. But we were really disappointed that the case they were working and clashed over was about as generic as a British cop thriller gets. Is the show’s second season any better?
CRIMINAL RECORD SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: We see a protest and rally in London’s Suffolk Square.
The Gist: Running point for the police contingent at the rally is DI June Lenker (Cush Jumbo), who is with the CID at Dalston Lane. There are riot police there, as well as an interpreter to see if any of what the person who is speaking at the protest can be considered inciting a riot.
As a group of racist white protesters overruns the riot cops and makes their way into the mostly Muslim crowd, a melee ensues. After Lenker and her crew disperse the protestors, she’s called over to see a teenage boy bleeding out from a stab wound to the chest.
Lenker is understandably distraught over this teen’s death happening on her watch, to the point where she visits the boy’s family as they are in mourning. At the same time, her boss (Lyndsey Marshal) is being questioned at a parliamentary inquiry about the incident, asking why the police seemed to be so passive and why no leads or witnesses have materialized.
At the same time, DCI Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi) has moved to a counterintelligence team on the Metro Police, and he’s been tracking down Cosmo Thompson (Dustin Demri-Burns), someone whom he previously thought was a small-time kingpin, but feels he might be into something bigger.
Lenker keeps going back to a blurry photo of one of the masked thugs, because she briefly saw his face before he lowered his mask; she swears it’s a man named Billy Fielding (Luther Ford), who went to prison for murdering his girlfriend six years prior. As she tries to track down just where in the prison system Fielding is, she keeps getting stonewalled. She even goes to visit the slain girl’s mother, whom she finds unconscious in her flat.
Also looking into the Suffolk Square melee is Hegarty, because some of the people involved are part of Thompson’s organization. When he sees the picture of Billy, and he finds out that Lenker is also looking for his whereabouts, he asks her to meet with him, and propose that they join forces.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We’ll stick to what we said during the Criminal Record‘s first season: It reminds us of Sherwood.
Our Take: Created by Paul Rutman, Criminal Record continues to be a generic British crime thriller that’s punctuated by good performances by its leads. The central premise of the show is that Lenker and Hegarty approach their jobs in very different ways, boiling down to new school vs. old school, and that both of them have messy personal lives. But neither of those factors is enough to carry along a case that isn’t particularly interesting.
The second season is going to have the two detectives join forces, and at a certain point Lenker will find out just how Hegarty’s less-than-kosher policing methods are going to come into play in this case. As far as she knows, Billy Fielding broke out of prison on his own, but by the end of the first episode, we see that he has a connection to Hegarty. What that connection is will likely be revealed quickly, but it will allow Hegarty to convince Lenker to let Billy infiltrate Thompson’s crew as a CI.
Perhaps there will be more to see with this case as the season goes on, but it feels that the dramatic tension will continue to be the two detectives clashing over their respective differences, which is something that will quickly get tiresome. Yes, we will likely see Lenker’s marriage to her husband, Leo Hanratty (Stephen Campbell Moore), under more strain than it already is. And Hegarty’s relationship with his daughter Lisa (Maisie Ayres) will come into play again. But neither story feels like it’ll be compelling enough to distract viewers from how boring and generic the central criminal plot is.
Performance Worth Watching: We always love Cush Jumbo’s intensity in everything she does, and she’s appropriately intense here as Lenker, whether she’s pursuing a suspect or empathizing for the family of the dead teen.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: As Hegarty tends to his partner, who might have fatally slipped and hit his head while pursuing Billy, he yells at Billy to never openly call him by his name.
Sleeper Star: We’re curious how much we’ll see Steven Campbell Moore as Lenker’s husband Leo, because the first episode took time to show them in a couples’ counseling session.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find, but that’s just because the first episode was so boring that none of it stuck in our head.
Our Call: SKIP IT. As much as we like Jumbo and Capaldi, there’s nothing about Criminal Record‘s second season that holds our interest.
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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.