Proper mind- set for British thriller enhances the fun

post-traumatic stress and associated problems with his marriage.

That weakness is key to the story and to the suspicions that engulf Budd after he’s named head of security for the home secretary, Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes).

The hawkish, ruthlessly ambitious Montague is a target — or perhaps the target is Budd, or someone else. Regardless, the threat levels are through the roof. There are bomb vests, truck bombs, regular bombs and a conspiratorial stew pitting the police, the security services and the government against one another — and all of them against Budd.

Though concerned with the revelation of character under pressure, Mercurio doesn’t build a credible enough character before putting him through the wringer. Budd is hazily sketched, and the extreme measures the story takes to extend its mystery and keep his motives in question make it hard to really care about until late in the season.

Stuck with this cipher of a role — he is stress personified — Madden gives a performance that’s alternately robotic and slightly unhinged. He doesn't do enough to distract us when Mercurio’s plot twists veer from reality or his characters refuse to act like rational humans.

Mercurio’s breakneck story feels, at every moment, both carefully constructed and made up on the spot. Yet it can also be a blast — for those who are all about the mystery and the forward momentum and who worry less about plausibility and psychological realism.

But whether U.S. viewers will be drawn to the series in the way British viewers were won’t be possible to determine, given that Netflix releases no viewership numbers.