Better review: Leila Farzad brings the essential quality of flawed humanity to this bent copper

It’s as if Farzad and her co-star Andrew Buchan are gradually tightening the screws on one another’s characters, scene by scene, and line by line

Detective Inspector Lou Slack (Leila Farzad) is a smart, hard-drinking, cigarette-smoking, highly effective police officer in the West Yorkshire force. She’s also a bent copper. But a bent copper who we desperately want to believe is also a “nice” bent copper. Redemption, after all, usually makes for great drama. And a dash of corruption in the lead character in a police show makes an intriguing change. Unlike in Line of Duty, here the high-ranking corrupt police officer is the investigator, not the investigated, the antihero who is also the hero. And unlike Catherine Cawood in Happy Valley – a hard act to follow – she’s wealthy and content with her life, complicated and compromised as it is. We want to know what Lou did that got her so entangled with the wrong side, and how she’s going to survive it as her web of deceit goes wrong. It’s a promising start to this five-part series, although I do wish that TV commissioners would take more risks on shows that don’t have a police uniform or a straining bodice in sight.

We learn that Lou and her family, now comfortably off, were lifted out of poverty some years ago by a nasty drugs baron, the soft-spoken-but-sinister Col McHugh (Andrew Buchan). We presume that she surreptitiously perverted the course of justice, helping him to avoid jail and go on to build his criminal empire. He is in her debt, and she is in his; according to him, they are “partners”. Theirs is a symbiotic, tense relationship – Lou’s builder husband Ceri (Samuel Edward-Cook) increasingly resents the mysterious late-night jobs that Col has her on – but that bond of mutual loyalty between Lou and the crime kingpin is strong.

The question is, for how much longer? Lou is asked to retrieve a gun from a drugs den, a dying lad next to it. She does so with the calm forensic care that Col expects of her. It doesn’t faze her, and she returns the murder weapon, macabre and gift-wrapped to Col at a very civilised dinner party at his enormous mansion. Soon afterwards, though, she discovers that the gun was later used by one of Col’s more impetuous employees, Noel (Kaya Moore) in a brutal post office robbery. Sickened by this, Lou decides that Noel should be punished – the nice, honourable side of her personality winning out here. Playing both sides, Lou gets commended for bravery and a violent crime swiftly solved. But there’s no doubt that Col is displeased with the way things turned out, and suspicious of Lou’s intervention.

By the end of episode one, the fissures in Lou’s various relationships and her double life are starting to show. Her younger son’s near death and partial disability from a sudden onset of meningitis adds to the stress at home. Lou’s junior partner, Esther (Olivia Nakintu), begins to notice her slightly odd behaviour. Sooner or later the gun, now in police hands, will become a focus of interest in the murder investigation she is heading – and that gun can clearly now be linked to the death in the drugs factory, and thus her friend Col and his gangster associate Noel. Coldly, Lou refuses to agree with Col that she will never again disobey his wishes. You can almost feel the chill. 

The dramatic tension is building, incrementally but surely. It is as if Farzad and Buchan are gradually tightening the screws on one another’s characters, scene by scene, and line by line: there is a great sense of impending mutual destruction between these protagonists. Without the essential quality of flawed humanity Farzad brings to the role of Lou, and Buchan’s subtle treatment of his urbane monster, complete with kindly face and a warm Irish brogue, the script by Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent would probably struggle. But maybe recent events have also made us that bit more open to the idea of police corruption. We now know that the police, like the fictional Lou, can do better.