Criminal Record: Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo Go Toe-To-Toe in Brit Crime Drama
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
It’s a noncontroversial opinion that cop shows from the United Kingdom are typically superior to their American counterparts: more methodical in construction, credible in their homey or squalid surroundings, and perceptive in the way that hideous crimes are entangled in society’s ills.
There are more CCTV cameras and fewer blasting guns, more diverse casts, more female leads (Prime Suspect, The Falls, Broadchurch) to shake up the traditional genre’s norms, and more richly specific performances from stage-trained actors.
If you’ve finished the yeasty fun of the recently ended Gary Oldman-led third season of Slow Horses on AppleTV+ and are looking to binge-watch a new crime series, you could do worse than Criminal Record. The eight-episode series from creator Paul Rutman (Vera, Indian Summers) — which begins today (January 10) with its first two episodes — follows two London detectives. There’s the wily old-timer Daniel Hegarty and the new face of the force, June Lenker. The pair lock horns over a decade-old murder case.
The familiar veteran cop versus upstart rookie trope is expanded here to include timely racial and gender conflicts. As police enforcement in North America is under scrutiny, the series comes on the heels of a scathing 2023 independent report on London police force as systematically misogynistic, racist, and homophobic, leading to a public apology by its new commissioner.
If that sounds like the premise of an earnest social justice lesson, be assured nothing can be entirely earnest that involves the prickly presence of Peter Capaldi as Hegarty. The lean, 65-year-old Scot, who has the jagged profile of an annoyed rooster, is best known for his television performances as the 12th incarnation of Dr. Who (2013-2017) and, before that, as the epically foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker, the Prime Minister’s director of communications in Armond Iannucci’s political satire, The Thick of It and spinoff movie, In The Loop.
We first meet Hegarty as a police detective moonlighting as a chauffeur. He’s driving a drunken couple across London when they begin prying into his private life. “Well come on, then, you must have more ghoulish tales for us,” asks the man. “I got a million,” says Hegarty dryly, opening the door a crack for potential future Criminal Record seasons to come.
The action switches to June Lenker (Cush Jumbo, best known for her work as lawyer Lucca Quinn in the series The Good Wife and its spinoff, The Good Fight). With her hair clipped to a military length, dressed in a unisex outfit at work and home, Lenker is all about police business, even if her colleagues don’t always agree. We first meet her as she is assigned to track down an anonymous domestic violence call because, her supervisor tells her, it takes “a woman’s touch.”
On tape, she hears the caller say she is being threatened by a man who brags that he stabbed to death another woman, for which another man is serving time. Lenker narrows the murder victim down to a woman named Adelaide Burrowes, who was savagely killed 2012, leaving behind a six-year-old son.
Like Lenker, the convicted man, Errol Mathis (Tom Moutchi) has a West African background. Lenker learns that his mother (Cathy Tyson) and a pro bono lawyer (Aysha Kala) have been campaigning for his release ever since, insisting Mathis was not guilty. The cop who elicited Mathis’s confession was Hegarty.
When Lenker disobeys orders to question Hegarty at his office, he’s condescending and dismissive of any possibility that the wrong man is in jail. He shocks Lenker when he refers to Mathis as a “poor man’s O.J.,” that is, a Black man charged with murdering a white woman.
Stonewalled by her higher-ups, Lenker decides to pursue the case on her own while Hegarty, using his connections on the force, is determined to shut her down.
Racial micro-aggressions flourish. Older white cops make bad jokes. Lenker’s white psychiatrist husband, Leo (Stephen Campbell Moore) repeatedly implies that Lenker looks for racism when it isn’t there.
The wily Hegarty goads Lenker by suggesting she has fallen into the trap of unconscious bias. “Sometimes, you see, an officer can bring to a case a certain distorted view, due to their own, dare I say it, pre-existing prejudice.”
Criminal Record isn’t quite primo-grade British crime drama. Flashbacks and cut-to-black sequences tend to be trite, and the script fails to match the level of the performances here. As the series develops, the script spins out a surfeit of subplots padding out the running time.
Hegarty’s complications include a web of drug dealers, informants, and far right groups, as well as his bonds to his troubled daughter (Maisie Ayres) and a shadowy disabled colleague (Charlie Creed-Miles). Lenker’s troubles include the progressive dementia of her mother (the estimable Zoë Wanamaker), threats to her 12-year-old son Jacob (Jordan A. Nash), and her racially obtuse husband, in a marriage that may have passed its expiry date.
Where Criminal Record works best is in scenes where Jumbo and Capaldi go toe-to-toe, as characters and actors. Jumbo, who has been twice nominated for playing male Shakespeare roles (Marc Antony, Hamlet) looks strong and is fluidly athletic in intensely physical scenes. Her character constantly pushes forward, in contrast to Capaldi’s ramrod posture and twitchy psychological gamesmanship.
The series takes off when the two of them are paired onscreen, in dingy cop shops, parking lots at night and at crime scenes, those underlit haunts where justice gets knocked into shape. If further seasons are green-lighted, Criminal Record could benefit from tightening of its narrative and focus on the strongest characters. But there’s the foundation for a strong series here.
Criminal Record. Created by Paul Rutman. Written by Paul Rutman and Ameir Brown. Directed by Shaun James Grant and Jim Loach. Starring Cush Jumbo, Peter Capaldi, Stephen Campbell Moore, Zoë Wanamaker and Charlie Creed-Miles. The first two episodes of Criminal Record are available on January 10 on Apple TV+.