When we first meet Peter Capaldi as DCI Daniel Hegarty in Apple TV+'s eight-part Criminal Record, two thoughts may be spinning through the average TV viewer's skull. 1) How come this man, with that terrifying face, has never played a police officer before? And 2) given said somber look, how did Capaldi land the Doctor Who family gig?
Just as we try to analyze what each minute of Capaldi's rearrangement of features might portend, we meet DS June Lenker, played by Cush Jumbo, who is just as ruthless and stubborn in her police work but, unlike DCI Hegarty, is fighting an uphill battle against race. , gender and age discrimination to do so.
Creator: Paul Rutman
Stars: Peter Capaldi, Cush Jumbo, Aysha Kala
When an anonymous 911 call from a domestic violence victim alleges that police locked up the wrong man for murder a decade ago, DS Lenker takes the case out of the cold and sets out to find the truth. But doing so puts her in the direct line of fire of well-connected DCI Hegarty, who locked up the man in question and sees her legacy at the Met tipping in the balance.
DS Lenker faces a barrage of microaggressions, as well as increasing departmental pressures. They put her front and center at a press conference to convey the Met's “technicolor diversity” and only include her in the domestic violence phone call in the first place because a superior says the case needs “the touch of a woman".
When several personal complaints against Lenker arise at work, it all begins to look like a Met-wide conspiracy backed by DCI Hegarty and his elusive group of old guard friends.
Much is made of the Herculean transformation that actors can make in their roles, with the full range of prosthetics, anti-aging software and accents from various hits at their disposal to aid the process, but here Capaldi has reshaped himself with the more basic. acting medium: that face.
DCI Hegarty takes the predatory menace of Capaldi's career-defining turn as Dr. Malcolm Tucker, but strips it of the witty one-liners and frothy fury. He just leaves a secretive, terrifying presence that we constantly try to decipher.
"We're marching at the same pace, right?" Hegarty at one point asks Sergeant Lenker during their game of cat and mouse. However, it becomes insidiously evident that this is not the case, that they operate in very different police forces and that they only pose as a single entity.
Cush Jumbo is a powerhouse here, with performance complex enough to make a career out of. While Hegarty (Capaldi) is largely dedicated to making shady phone calls or conducting discreet interrogations in poorly lit police rooms, Lenker (Jumbo) is constantly running toward what everyone else is running away from. She jumps into an elevator and is beaten within an inch of her life by a criminal, then dives into a burning building in search of him.
One terrible thing after another happens to Lenker, and she shakes off much of it with an exasperated, half-smiling sigh. But when we're alone with her in brief, raw moments, she doesn't let the gravity of it all escape her.
Both performances are riddled with enough ambiguity and hesitation to keep you on the fence about how the mystery of the cold case might be resolved. But that question quickly yields to the sheer electricity of Jumbo and Capaldi as adversaries, whose every exchange comprises a verbal dance of thinly veiled hostility and stinging superiority. His scenes sizzle.
If Criminal Record is a trio, then London is the third player and puts on a tour de force to counter Jumbo and Capaldi's efforts. Each scene is believably embedded in the British capital, which is beautifully filmed even as it captures monotonous moments that quickly devolve into horror.
Telling a story of the Met's contradictions and the difficult job its officers are doing in a deeply flawed system, this is the perfect show to convey the force as we now know it.
As an official report last year found, it is a place of institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia, with public trust at a devastating level. The landmark report found a culture of bullying, discouraged officers and “embedded” discrimination, all of which is evident in the eight episodes of Criminal Record.
However, the show still doesn't lose sight of the immensely challenging job these officers face, even more so given that bad actors can lurk within their own ranks. Capaldi's DCI Hegarty embodies all of these contradictions: he is clearly not the hero of the work.
Watch Criminal Record 2024 Tv Series Trailer
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