Two years ago, the former police officer and debut screenwriter Tony Schumacher gave us five of the most riveting and harrowing hours of television there have been for many years. The Responder was the story of Chris Carson (a career-best performance from Martin Freeman), a man slowly being driven to despair by the pressures of his job as a frontline officer answering emergency calls on night shift and the futility of trying to hold back the tide of crime perpetuated mostly by people who are desperate, destitute or mentally ill. “It’s like playing whack-a-mole,” he said. “Except the moles wear trackies. Every night, there’s blood on my boots and spit on my face and it never, ever stops.”
There was a compelling, perfectly worked plot involving a missing bag of drugs and Chris’s corrupt connection with a local drug dealer who was murdered in pursuit of the vanished stash. But the meat of the thing, its genius, was the credible deterioration of Chris and the portrait the series painted of a society at the point of breakdown.
