LINE OF DUTY CALLS
Another season of addictive police corruption series launches in SA, writes Tymon Smith
TNever has so much TV been made and never has so much TV been watched
JED MERCURIO
hese days Jed Mercurio is celebrated as “the Shonda Rhimes of British television” — a writer and showrunner whose success as the creator of the hit shows Line of Duty and The Bodyguard seems to have given him free rein to do what he wants in the television universe.
The son of Italian immigrants, Mercurio started his professional life not as writer but as a medical student who joined the Royal Air Force and intended to become a specialist in aviation medicine. He left the RAF in 1992 and, while working as a physician in a hospital, answered an advert in the British Medical Journal to work as a writer on
Cardiac Arrest, a BBC medical drama hailed for its uncomfortably real depiction of hospital life. That set Mercurio on a new path as a full-time writer and creator of several acclaimed shows, including the medical drama Bodies, which he adapted from his own novel.
But it was his next project that changed everything, becoming one of the most popular dramas in BBC history, with a dedicated global base of obsessive fans. Line of Duty focuses on the officers of the AC12 unit, tasked with investigating corruption in the police force. Each season has dropped its audience into the shadowy world and tangled complexities of its back-stabbing, doublecrossing and untrustworthy characters. The sixth season — much publicised in UK media with reams published weekly dissecting each episode — arrives in SA this week as one of the anchor shows on the new BBC/ITV collaborative streaming service Brit Box.
Mercurio says the show was inspired by his interest in writing about the police as an institution. “I wanted it to be about police corruption,” he said. “The ambition was to create a police series that would look at the darker side of policing, rather than being a more formulaic, conventional police drama.”
Part of the success of Line of Duty stems from its arrival on the BBC just in time for streaming and social media, which allowed the show to travel across the world and made it available for bingewatching and rewatching between seasons. Mercurio says the technology hasn’t changed his approach to creating drama — telling dense and complex stories that the audience needs to concentrate on — but it has created a way for the audience to pause a show, rewind and rewatch it. “All those things help shows that are asking a little bit more of the audience in terms of the level of concentration,” he says.
Line of Duty is the kind of show that doesn’t spend a lot of time at the start of a new season rounding up events and characters from previous seasons. Mercurio has enough of a devoted fanbase that he’s able to drop them into the deep end when a new season starts. The change in viewer habits has led to a change in thinking in the boardrooms of broadcasters, allowing creators like Mercurio not to have to waste time fighting with executives who believe audiences need to be guided through the storyline and reminded of what is going on.
Speculation is rife that, contrary to indications, there may yet be a seventh season of Line of Duty in the works, but Mercurio is not saying anything. He’s focused on two new shows produced by his company HTM Television — one being the Northern Ireland police thriller Bloodlands, which stars James Nesbitt. It recently debuted in the UK and is set for a second season next year.
He’s also working on the bomb disposal unit thriller Trigger Point, starring Line of Duty’s Vicky McClure, due for release later this year. “It’s an exciting time to be involved in TV. Never has so much TV been made and never has so much TV been watched,” says Mercurio.
All six seasons of ‘Line of Duty’ are now available on Brit Box. To find out more information and sign up for the service, go to britbox.com.
Read about Brit Box and new developments in streaming in today’s Business Times