Rage-filled Martin is riveting – but I’ve stopped rooting for him
The Responder
Sunday, BBC1 ★★★☆☆
Suits
F riday, BBC3 ★★☆☆☆
The first series of The Responder (2022), starring Martin Freeman as night copper Chris Carson, was excellent and riveting, but so stressful it took a couple of years off my life. It’s a miracle I’m even here today, in fact.
I was hoping for an easier, less life-shortening ride with this second series. Maybe Chris had taken up yoga? Or knitting? Or had cheered himself up with a nice top from H&M? Maybe, in short, he’d learnt techniques to unwind and wouldn’t be putting us all through the wringer again? But, no, he’s still like a pressure cooker about to blow its lid and I still had to (mostly) watch from behind a cushion. But there was something different on this occasion and it’s this: he started to get on my nerves. Is empathy a finite quality? I reckon so, as Chris Carson eventually exhausted mine.
This was created by Tony Schumacher, an ex-police officer from Liverpool, where this is set, and it does have the kind of authenticity and bleakness (oh boy, so much bleakness) that other police series lack. Those night shifts. All those broken people. It’s destroying Chris, and he knows it, and once again Freeman is terrific. The suppressed rage, haunted look, pain, sleeplessness, are all written across his meaty, haggard little face.
The first series involved a stolen rucksack of cocaine that kicked off one hell of a mess and led to him becoming compromised. He did it for the sake of his family, and what we understood was this: he’s doing bad things for a good reason. It always had a strong moral core. During this second series my mood was more: oh, fella, not this bad decision again. Don’t you never learn?
As the first episode (of five) opens, we do establish that he is in group therapy, at least. But he’s frustrated. ‘When is this going to f-ing kick in?’ he wants to know. He has separated from his wife, Kate (MyAnna Buring), who has been offered a career promotion, but it will mean moving to London with their daughter, Tilly. ‘But she’s all I’ve got left,’ he says, desperately. You only manage to see her once every three weeks, Kate says. He immediately tells a lie. He has been given a ‘day job’ in the force. He will be able to spend more time with Tilly now.
This is when my empathy started to drain. You lie to your kid, and the mother of your kid? Also, I wondered: he has time off, surely, and his shifts don’t start until 10pm, so why isn’t he seeing the daughter he can’t live without more often? He did seem more selfish than noble on this occasion.
His desperation to make ‘the day job’ real triggers the plot. He’ll do anything to get it even though his boss, Deb Barnes (Amaka Okafor), tells him it’s off the cards ‘because everyone thinks you’re a knobhead’. On the other hand, she says, if you do this one (bent) thing, it could be back on the cards? And so it kicks off again. Do this if you want that day job. No, he says. No way. But then he will acquiesce and it’s that, over and over, which takes it out of him. And also us. Somewhere along the line I did stop rooting for him. And just wanted it to be over.
It is tense and dark. It may even be darker than before now his fellow cop, Rachel (Adelayo Adedayo), who was once an upright probationer, seems to have caught the making bad-decisions bug.
What I enjoyed most were the fantastic secondary characters, particularly Town Centre Casey (Emily Fairn), the hapless drug addict, and her sometimes boyfriend Marco (Josh Finan). I could watch a show just about them. There are some wonderfully funny lines too. Casey is not impressed when Marco says he is thinking of moving to Runcorn. ‘There’s no Asda there,’ she says. ‘There is!’ he protests. ‘There’s a massive one!’ I laughed. Chris, I nearly forgot to say, also has to deal with the trauma of his childhood and the violent, drunken father who is now an old man. His father is played by Bernard Hill in his last role and he’s brilliant, of course. Plus, here we are, back in Liverpool, with someone desperate for a job. It just seemed fitting somehow.
The BBC has bought all nine series of the American legal drama Suits, which is odd given that you can already watch eight of the series on Netflix. (I don’t know what happened to the ninth.) On the other hand, because it landed at the BBC I did watch two episodes, whereas I’d never watched it on Netflix. Go figure.
Cards on the table: I was motivated by wanting to see if Meghan Markle had been a decent actress. What was the deal, pre Harry? I’m pretty sure I won’t be alone in watching for that reason. And? Patience, my friends. Let’s say what this show is first.
It’s set in New York amid cut-throat corporate lawyers who say things like: ‘I’m not about caring, I’m about winning’, but will turn out to have a soft side, obviously. It is pulpy and soapy and predictable but also slick with the occasional smart line.
As for Ms Markle, hard to say. She plays Rachel Zane, a paralegal, and each of her scenes involved a camera following her as she sashayed teeteringly up some corridor, in a super-tight skirt and vertiginous heels, then waited while she delivered some lines, and followed her back again. And that was about it. I didn’t think: ‘This woman is destined for greatness and will one day blow our minds with her frilly-lidded jam.’