Watch TV with Paul Flynn
BECAUSE NEXT YEAR is the Tokyo Olympics and because Japan is a fundamentally amazing place, you’ll be seeing a lot of the country on TV over the next 12 months. The first serious instalment of the small screen’s incumbent Japanophilia is Giri/haji, a hugely impressive BBC noir from the makers of Chernobyl. It takes a mid-market family with respectable trappings and embroils their backstory against the hyper-violent organised crimes of the Yakusa, the Japanese mafia.
Giri translates as ‘duty’, haji as ‘shame’. There’s a lot of it threaded through this densely plotted drama, which skips seamlessly between Britain and Japan.
Giri/haji is perfect autumnal TV: a mysterious, intelligent potboiler uncovering a theatrically criminal subculture previously untouched by British telly. A cop lives in Tokyo suburbia with his wife, parents and a slyly errant teenage daughter who’s just about to be expelled from school after stabbing a boy with a pair of scissors for sticking his hand up her skirt (side-note: her bob is the TV haircut of the season). When Dad questions her, saying in his day boys like that would’ve been batted off with a slap, she replies diffidently, ‘Girls are different now.’
So, too, are crime dramas. The story escalates at a brisk, human pace, dotted with accents of canny black humour. When Dad is despatched to London to track down his familial connection to the Yakusa, the brilliant Kelly Macdonald is introduced as a forensic investigations lecturer who uses Tinder sex as a sedative. The cop meets a rent boy in Soho’s Blue Posts pub, his first connection to uncovering London’s illicit Japanese underworld. I’m not sure whether I was imagining a clever reference to The Crying Game in the relationship of the blank visiting copper and the prostitute.
Where Giri/haji excels is in its determination to reboot the police procedural into a genre rippling with international flair. As we saw with their phenomenal work on Chernobyl, producers Sister Pictures have formidable form in building complete worlds that look epic while whispering directly into your ear. The incredible sleight of hand of Giri/haji might just be making British drama feel, once again, like the global market leader. Begins Thursday, 9pm, BBC Two