Britain produces cop shows with an abandon that defies our present moment’s global supply shortages. Just this week, ITV launches two new procedurals – Ridley and The Suspect – while the BBC brings back its hit surveillance drama, The Capture, for a second season. It is a national addiction on a scale usually reserved for tea consumption, football hooliganism and insincere apologies. Within this obsession, The Capture represents the genre at its classiest and, though it might upset some patriots at our state broadcaster to say so, at its most American.
Holliday Grainger – surely one of the most charismatic actors to remain predominantly constrained to the small screen – returns as Rachel Carey, now promoted to DCI and working within the bubble of Correction. Correction, as The Capture’s first series exposed, is hi-tech audiovisual manipulation software, used for the planting of digital evidence by the authorities. As such, viewers can be fairly confident that, even after the cliffhanger ending of the last season, Carey isn’t naïve to the total immorality of the system. “No, I haven’t joined them, you big bloody idiot,” she whispers to an injured colleague, somewhat indiscreetly. “I’m trying to beat them.”
