The first episode of Stan’s new Sydney-set crime drama contains various title drops –almost enough to warrant a drinking game. You can forgive repeated use of the phrase “critical incident”, given that it’s spoken by members of the jargon-y police force, but it becomes a little annoying when the show insists on telling us about said incident while delaying the revealing of it, creating an inconsistent stop-start energy that remains an issue across its entire six-episode arc.
Referring to the titular event through dialogue and cutting around it emphasises its significance, really applying the highlighter pen. Created and co-written by Sarah Bassiuoni, the show explores how the effects of a single event can ricochet across various people’s lives – like the ABC’s adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s novel The Slap, though that series was far more effective.
Anything but subtle, Critical Incident opens in a Blacktown police station where a cop – Zilficar “Zil” Ahem (Akshay Khanna) – has been detained, eyes wide and rattled, a tear rolling down his cheek while a heartbeat sound effect further reiterates that he’s distressed. Also at the station is the show’s other lead: a worried-looking teenager named Dalia (Zoë Boe). This opening scene is reasonably atmospheric but a tough sell, asking the audience to invest in the emotional fallout of an event we’re yet to witness.
The script then jumps back in time, to before the critical you-know-what, following Zil as he arrives at work and Dalia as she hangs out at school, then goes to a massive house party in the evening with a small-time drug dealer (Jai Waetford) she’s romantically interested in.
Just as the pace starts gathering momentum, the narrative jumps around again, skipping past the titular event to Zil being grilled by a “critical incident investigator” (Simone Kessell), whose character feels like a watered down version of the anti-corruption investigators from Line of Duty.
Critical Incident’s plotting feels more frustrating than suspenseful; I wanted to yell “just show us the damn incident!”
We eventually discover it involves a tragedy that occurs after Zil chases Dalia into a train station, pursuing her because she matches a suspect’s description. Dalia runs away – an odd thing for an innocent person to do. Why she fled is obviously a significant question, though this, too, is put in highlighter pen. The episode ends with a person literally asking: “Why’d you run?”
The dialogue can be quite on the nose. As the plot thickens, Zil increasingly speaks in hushed breaths, losing friends in the force and making comments like: “You were supposed to be the one that I could trust.”
Meanwhile Dalia’s arc takes a conventional “crime don’t pay” pivot; she turns to selling drugs for a dealer (Hunter Page-Lochard) who also runs a bakery.
One attempted drug deal, which goes down in broad daylight in a busy community area, felt manifestly unrealistic. The script is dotted with moments like this that defy believability, never crossing into the outright implausible, but certainly straining at its edges.
The show is plagued throughout by its pace issues. Dalia’s character development, for instance, feels both slow and rushed: it takes a while for her to burrow into a life of crime but then things escalate quickly – just in time for a conventionally violent ending. Boe plays the part well, headstrong in some ways but with a vulnerability that gets under your skin. Khanna, a British actor, pitches to a louder frequency as Zil; he’s quite good and his Australian accent is excellent.
Critical Incident made me nostalgic for Australian cop shows that are older but remain faster, edgier and grittier – among them Wildside and East West 101. The latter is still the best example of a multicultural Australian police drama that tackles racism head on, its Muslim protagonist forever caught between a rock and a hard place, balancing obligations to his job, religion and community.
That show had a real fire in its belly. Critical Incident, on the other hand, lacks oomph.
Critical Incident is streaming in Australia on Stan
