Halfway through its compelling run, BBC2's Line of Duty is smashing gender stereotypes and giving the celebrated Scandi-noir dramas a run for their money
Three police officers murdered in a lethal ambush; a fourth spectacularly defenestrated; a seriously injured individual in witness protection finished off in hospital – and the only survivor of the carnage, DI Lindsay Denton, who may or may not be personally implicated in all or some or none of the above carnage, has her head violently stuck down the lavatory by her colleagues as punishment for dispatching her three colleagues with "no firearms, no backup".
Welcome to the gripping world of BBC2's Line of Duty , halfway through its second series and, without so much as a Nordic woolly jumper or sub-title in sight, possibly on its way to becoming as addictive as The Bridge, The Killing and Borgen. If there is any justice in the world, it deserves to be broadcast in Scandinavia at primetime.
For the uninitiated, Line of Duty's plot is driven by an anti-corruption unit's investigation into why an individual in witness protection is suddenly moved because of "an immediate and credible threat to life", but without adequate protection, resulting in disaster.
DI Denton, deep in debt, forced to downsize to a flat she hates, unpopular and isolated, is investigated and remanded in prison. Inside, her porridge is spiced with faeces and her piano-playing hands are scalded with boiling water. Now, with the fourth episode due to be shown on Wednesday (at least for those still with conventional telly-watching habits), her insistence on her innocence, whether truth or artifice, has been believed by at least one colleague. Somebody else much higher up may yet be on the take. So far it is so very familiar – and yet so absolutely not.
In the hands of the writer Jed Mercurio (creator of the excellent Cardiac Arrest, Bodies and the award- winning first series of Line of Duty), the second series is only superficially about hunter and hunted. Just as the groundbreaking American series The Wire, created by David Simon, tells of the darker side of the American dream, and the violent entrepreneurship that poverty and exclusion spawns, Line of Duty mesmerises, in part, because it reflects something of the reality of these times. There are no good or bad characters – almost everyone is tainted.
The rules are broken, sooner or later, by all those tasked to "guard the guards", not out of evil or malice but because life is a mess. Or it rapidly becomes so, in a culture fashioned on the notion that, if you want it, you ought to be able to have it.
When everything is relative, the brakes no longer work: sleeping with a colleague's husband; corruption; hobbies that almost without noticing turn into vices, all are protected by an institution that is at its most efficient when looking out for itself. It's pure fiction, and yet …
"No single element hasn't been done before," Mercurio explains. "Cops investigating cops, one big case, gallows humour, the feel of an authentic workplace – but put them all together and Line of Duty is the only one that's done them all."
He may be right. But Line of Duty is also compelling because it is not so much a saga about justice as an amoral and ambivalent game of human chess, pulled off by a superb team of actors (including Keeley Hawes, Vicky McClure, Adrian Dunbar and Martin Compston) and a script that delivers as much by what it doesn't say as what it does.
"The script is the star," McClure rightly says. But something else is going on as well. In the 1970s series Police Woman, Angie Dickinson played Sergeant Pepper Anderson. She was blond, curvy and in every episode she exposed a great deal of flesh, lipgloss – and her firearm. At the point of murder, mayhem and rape, she was almost always the victim, waiting to be rescued; a pneumatic liability.
DI Denton is something else altogether. It could be the psychopathic fringe cut with a blunt pair of scissors, the mascara from the day before, the utter absence of vanity and a predilection for frightening bursts of extreme violence, but in Denton there is an authenticity to her conflicted character that works precisely because it is so far from the run-of-the-mill stereotype of what is deemed attractive and likable – a refreshing trend the Scandinavians launched via Sarah Lund in The Killing.
"I absolutely loved it," Keeley Hawes says. "I didn't love going into the makeup truck every day and having them look at me, saying, 'Yep, that's great!' without even brushing my hair, only putting a bit more dark under my eyes … I don't think anyone has ever looked that bad on the television screen. It's liberating."
The bunny-boiler drama Fatal Attraction, a dated saga of a woman stalking a married man after a one-night stand, opens this month on the London stage, but the character of Denton rejects the stereotype of the psychofemme with a broken heart. She is, instead, a female character who loves her work and functions without so much as the shadow of a current romance (unlike DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect) .
"She'll be wishing she never messed with you by the time we're through with her," Superintendent Ted Hastings (Dunbar) says to DC Kate Fleming (the excellent McClure) of Denton – only for Denton to trap them with evidence of their own misdemeanours. So: female, flawed, adept and skilled. Don't we need more such roles that go against the tired old grain?
According to the US-based Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, women in television and films, including family films, are still "sidelined, sexualised and stereotyped".
In the "reel" world, women are decorative but they rarely hold down a proper job (Sandra Bullock, floating in space in Gravity, is the exception). As Geena Davis says, what girls watch has an influence: "If she can see it, she can be it."
In an early episode of Line of Duty, Jessica Raine, who appears in Call the Midwife, plays a policewoman who is shoved out of a window to her death. Now, like many of the rest of us, she's a viewer. "Oh my God," she says. "It's really good, isn't it?" The answer – in both Swedish and in English – has to be a definite yes.
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