The audience got an answer, in part because of a clue involving the recurring misspelling “definately”, but not all were satisfied. There was a sense that creator Jed Mercurio’s bravura technique – the breathless pacing, the shocking cull of crucial characters, the lingering reveals and outrageous cliff-hangers – was no longer seamless. Mercurio had woven an increasingly compressed milieu, putting together a decade’s worth of crimes and suspects, but he couldn’t engineer a genuinely satisfying conclusion.
HBO, SBS, BBC
Some of the best shows in the police genre (from left): The Wire, The Killing and Happy Valley. That setback needn’t overly detract from
The audience got an answer, in part because of a clue involving the recurring misspelling “definately”, but not all were satisfied. There was a sense that creator Jed Mercurio’s bravura technique – the breathless pacing, the shocking cull of crucial characters, the lingering reveals and outrageous cliff-hangers – was no longer seamless. Mercurio had woven an increasingly compressed milieu, putting together a decade’s worth of crimes and suspects, but he couldn’t engineer a genuinely satisfying conclusion.
That setback needn’t overly detract from
Line of Duty’s appeal. While the latest season has been streaming exclusively on BritBox in Australia, the previous five are available via Netflix and Stan (owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead) and remain eminently watchable. The show’s unerring focus on corruption, and whether it was driven by individuals or had become institutional, offered a new outlook for the police procedural.