With “another week of nights stretching out” in front of him, police response officer Chris Carson (Martin Freeman) knows he is “going to crack” soon - it’s just a matter of when. As he sees it, his job - heading to the scene after a 999 call - is not “such important work”, as his therapist has tried to soothingly put it in one of their mandatory sessions, which frame the first episode of The Responder. Instead, it has become an arbitrary game of “whack-a-mole, except the moles wear trackies”. He can’t remember the last time he did something good - and when he hisses “if you do this again, I’m going to f**king kill you” at the man who has called him out to the same block of flats twice in one night to arbitrate a dispute over a neighbour’s dog, you believe him.
To say that Chris is burnt out would be an understatement. The frustrations (and sometimes outright trauma) of frontline policing in the face of resource cut after resource cut after resource cut have left him feeling like “a f**king shell”, and his wife Kate (MyAnna Buring) says she can see him “disappearing” in front of her and their little daughter, Tilly (Romi Hyland-Rylands). The fact that Chris has a clandestine arrangement going with old school friend and drug dealer Carl (Ian Hart), sharing the odd bit of intel here, picking up the odd associate there, only complicates matters further - not least when teenage heroin addict Casey (Emily Fairn, scene-stealing in her first TV role) comes careering onto his radar, traipsing around Liverpool with “more coke than you’ve ever seen in your life”.
