Blue Lights season one spoilers below
The second season of Blue Lights, the BBC’s Northern Ireland-set police drama, landed on BBC iPlayer at midnight, thrilling fans who had been on tenterhooks for a whole year waiting for the hotly-anticipated new installment.
The six-episode season sees the return of Tommy (Nathan Braniff), Annie (Katherine Devlin) and Grace (Siân Brooke) – three police officers who are still on their probation – as they deal with gritty crimes in the capital.
This season the city is quaking after the collapse of the McIntyre organisation. There’s a turf war between gangs fighting to fill its spot, and Lee Thompson (Seamus O'Hara), an ambitious young man from a loyalist background, promises to cause havoc both with the police officers and the criminal underworld.
Here’s everything to know about the buzzy new series, which critics have described as “engrossing and authentic” and “must-watch TV”.
What’s season two about?
Set in Belfast in the modern day, Blue Lights follows three new police officers: the younger Annie Conlon and Tommy Foster and 41-year-old Grace, who has just made a job switch from being a social worker. It delves into Ireland’s history and the religious, political and social tensions in Belfast – while also being a cracking police thriller.
“We wanted to tell that story of people who are more or less, most of the time just trying to do good and they screw up and mess up in really big ways,” said co-creator Declan Lawn in 2023. “It’s a really interesting time to set a drama now in Northern Ireland. This place has been in the news a lot in the last five years as a result of Brexit. There is political instability here as a result of that.”In part two, the new police recruits are markedly less bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, which is a very good thing: matters are getting seriously dark in capital.
We join the series a year after the shocking death of police colleague Gerry Cliff and the downfall of one of Belfast’s major drug gangs. But its diminishment has left a vacuum which criminals are racing to fill. And there are some new recruits within the police force who start to erode the united front that we saw in season one.
As we join the show, Grace’s son has left for university, so she’s getting used to life at home without him. Annie starts to get close to new recruit Shane (Frank Blake), while ex-CID officer, Murray Canning (Desmond Eastwood) takes Tommy under his wing. Meanwhile, boss Helen (Joanne Crawford) is getting used to her new role as the station’s inspector.
“Series two is bigger, bolder and more dramatic,” said Lawn to the BBC. “Series one was about our recruits having their feet held in the fire and in series two they are firmly in the fire.
“The city is under siege with drugs and petty crime and they can’t work out what’s going on nor do they have the resources to deal with it.
At the heart of the series is a story about a veteran, Lee Thompson, who returns to see the place he has grown up in torn apart by drugs and crime. He decides to wage a one-man revolution... and it causes total chaos for our police officers and the city in general. Everything spirals out of control and the pressure grows.”
Where is Blue Lights set and filmed?
Blue Lights is both set and filmed in Belfast – the city is crucial to the show’s plot as the very raw history of The Troubles continues to reverberate in the present day.
“Blue Lights wouldn’t exist without the proficiency of the talented cast and crew that live in Belfast,” said Lawn and fellow creator Adam Patterson to the BBC. Both writers grew up in Northern Ireland.
“On a personal level I would say this is our life’s work. For many years through documentaries and photography we have tried to represent and understand this place and therefore ourselves and did so with limited success. What we have achieved with Blue Lights has extended beyond what we could have hoped for.”
The second season particularly focuses on the area around Dundonald’s Granton Park housing estate and around Newtownabbey (a town that’s counted as Greater Belfast).
“I think we’ve pushed the boundaries of what we felt we could do creatively whilst still retaining that authenticity and acceptability that pertains to representing a contemporary place like Belfast,” said Patterson. “Some of what we’ve filmed has not been easy to show because it requires us to look at ourselves deeply as a society which is difficult because there are no easy answers.”
Lawn said: “Stylistically in series two we wanted to evolve and show more of Belfast and I don’t just mean having more shots of officers in Belfast but standalone shots of the city that mean something to the storyline. We really worked hard to find the tapestry and the blanket imagery that would lead into our worlds and people and that led to it feeling more visceral and real. We wanted to show more of this place that we love but that is still in many ways troubled.”
Who is playing who in season two?
Season two sees the return of actors Brooke, Devlin and Braniff, as well as some of their supporting castmates: Joanne Crawford returns to play Sergeant Helen McNally who has received a promotion; Hannah McClean returns to play Jen Robinson who has now left the police service to become a solicitor; Andi Osho returns to play Sergeant Sandra Cliff who is mourning the death of her husband Gerry.
There are also some new faces too: John Lynch joins the cast, playing crime family head James McIntyre, while Seamus O’Hara plays this season’s key antagonist Lee Thompson. Find more about who is playing who here.
Who has made the show?
The second series, like the first, has been made by Derry-born investigative journalist Declan Lawn and Belfast-based filmmaker and writer Adam Patterson. The pair worked together for years for BBC Panorama before collaborating on their own drama series. They wrote The Salisbury Poisonings – the BBC’s most watched drama of 2020 – and wrote the 2022 thriller Rogue Agent which starred Gemma Arterton and James Norton.
“Coming back for series two was like coming back to meet old friends and then devising new ways to put your old friends through torture. It was a joy to be back filming again,” said Lawn to the BBC.
“To be working like this in our home town and to be able to make a show about the place that we love is something quite special that comes around really rarely,” said Patterson.
How to watch?
There are two options, both excellent. For those who love to binge-watch TV, all six episodes of the police-thriller landed on BBC’s iPlayer last night. For those who like the added tension of having to wait for a week for resolutions, the BBC is also broadcasting the show episode by episode on Monday nights at 9pm.
What have the critics said?
Blue Lights has picked up near-universal smash reviews: “Finally, a police procedural that’s worth your time,” said one paper about season one; “This thrilling cop drama is one of TV’s best shows,” said another. Others were just as complimentary, describing the cop thriller as “fantastically tense”, a “rare gem” and “a thoughtful, authentic and emotionally resonant new drama”.
Season two is promising more of the same, with one reviewer saying the show had returned “in the finest of health” and another saying it was “engrossing and authentic”.
