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.
