Apple TV+’s new drama opens at night with Peter Capaldi apparently working as a taxi driver, with two obnoxious characters in the back. The waves of fury and hatred roll off him. I want to note up top that Capaldi marauding the mean streets of London or Glasgow à la Taxi Driver is a show I would watch. Imagine Capaldi as a man forced into nightly proximity with humanity. Wouldn’t you give just about anything to see that?
Fortunately, this show gives him an almost equally sublime role to play. Criminal Record essentially functions as a showcase for Capaldi as DCI Daniel Hegarty, an old-school detective (of the un-bonhomous type), and Cush Jumbo as DS June Lenker, whose race and sex are enough for him to mark her down as part of the new guard.
Their paths intersect when a domestic violence victim makes an anonymous call suggesting that her partner might have previously killed someone called Amelia Burrows. Lenker finds out that Hegarty was the investigating officer on the Burrows case and the victim’s boyfriend, Errol Mathis, was charged with her murder. Mathis is serving a 24-year prison sentence – possibly wrongly.
Alone, Jumbo or Capaldi can hold anyone’s attention. Together, squaring off as adversaries, they are mesmerising. If ever there is going to be an award invented for best joint performance, make it this year, for them. Capaldi is terrifying as the cold predator sniffing round his prey, searching for weakness, prepared to wait for a quick, clean kill. Jumbo is fantastic as an opponent far from unaffected by all he brings to their contest – experience, connections, an indeterminable amount of malevolence – but resolving to go ever harder at him and at the truth about Mathis’s conviction and Burrows’s killer. We see Hegarty meet up with his old crew to check that previous arrangements will withstand a new inspection.
Through the protagonists, Criminal Record interrogates many depressingly pertinent issues in depressingly timely fashion. Most overtly, it looks at racism in institutional and individual forms. In the first episode, Lenker, who is Black, is discomfited by Hegarty’s passing reference to Mathis, who is also Black, as “the poor man’s OJ” because – she presumes – he killed his white girlfriend. When Lenker tells her white partner, Leo (Stephen Campbell Moore), about it, he suggests that she is overreacting. Is she? Is it his place to tell her? Did she ask for his opinion? Is the divine right to offer it a function of white male privilege? Oh, I could go on!
None of which is to say that Lenker is a flawless protagonist. Jumbo is given as many layers to play as Capaldi. We see many versions of that treacherous business of letting the end justify the means unfold. We are led to ask ourselves whether we should hold officers of the law, and whether they should hold themselves, to higher standards than the rest of us. All of which, of course, resonates amid the onslaught of real-life headlines about police corruption and disregard for (particularly women’s) rights and safety.
The only drawback to giving so much time, space and glorious complexity to the main pair is that the secondary characters are slightly underbaked. Some fine actors – such as Cathy Tyson as Errol’s campaigning mother, Doris, and Zoë Wanamaker as Lenker’s elderly mother, Maureen – are not given much to do. Wanamaker’s character seems to be there to allow the programme to highlight the extra burden of care that working women shoulder and to prepare for Lenker’s entrapment by Hegarty, courtesy of his contacts at the professional standards department.
It would also have been great to see more of Mathis’s overworked but indefatigable lawyer Sonya (Aysha Kala), simply because Kala gives one of those sudden, unexpectedly and ineffably brilliant performances that make you sit up and take notice of the television.
Plot-wise, there is no new ground being broken here, although the intertwining of the past and present cases and their eventual unpicking is interesting enough. But the cleverness and subtlety with which so many questions are posed and issues teased out through the main characters are more than worth the price of admission. But I want Capaldi’s Taxi Driver, too.
• Criminal Record is on Apple TV+
