When I’m in New York or Berlin, I’m out just about every night, soaking up the music, dance, theater, and miscellaneous events that are available in those cities. I hardly ever watch TV during those seasons. But the whole time I’m there, I’m also keeping a list of the television programs people recommend to me—mainly cop shows from various countries around the world—that I can watch to my heart’s content when I return to Berkeley.
So far this summer I’ve managed to see all five seasons of Line of Duty, an excellent British show that is wildly popular on its own turf. Each season features a new crime—generally several intertwined crimes—to be resolved by the stalwart investigators in AC-12 (that is, anti-corruption unit twelve, which is assigned to root out crimes committed by other cops). But in addition to each season’s gripping plots, there is an over-arching plot involving an unnamed but very high-up corrupt police administrator whose name may or may not begin with H. As a procedural, this one feels real enough to be persuasive; and as a demonstration of good, low-key British acting, it can’t be beat. One of the most interesting aspects of the show is the fact that it takes place in an unnamed city (it was filmed mainly but not entirely in Belfast), and all the characters have different regional accents—as if to suggest that Scotland, the Midlands, Northern Ireland, and southeast London have all come together in a single place. You have to stay on your toes to keep up with the action, but it all pays off in the end.
The other series I’ve watched in full, so far, is the first and perhaps the only season of something called Delhi Crime. This remarkable concoction is so realistic-feeling that it seems almost like a documentary, though its attitude toward character—not to mention its plenitude of characters—reminds me of some of the best works of Indian fiction, like Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance or Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. It is also, in its own way, a Delhi version of The Wire—and like The Wire, it appears to have sprung from the imagination of a single person. The David Simon figure is in this case named Richie Mehta, and you can find his name all over the credits, from the “created by” and “written and directed by” at the front to the tiny end-notes about assistant directors and subtitle writers.
So many things are gripping about this series that I hesitate to limit its appeal by naming them. The cops are all characters: some good, some bad, some middling, and all struggling against circumstances that would make anyone else give up on the job. The one-and-only crime at the heart of the show is based on a real one—the horrific gang-rape of a young woman on a bus—and we watch as, day after day, the cops make Herculean efforts to catch the six offenders. The female DSO who heads up the investigation is staunchness personified (she basically doesn’t go home between the rape and the final arrest, five days later), but some of her helpers are no less admirable in their stolid pursuit of reasonable justice. And to watch the “procedures” in this police procedural is fascinating for a Westerner raised on Anglo-American cop shows. When the Delhi cops arrest someone, for instance, they don’t put him in handcuffs; instead, one of the police officers holds the perp firmly by the hand. To evade protestors at the front door of the police station, they might all —including superior officers and criminals alike—have to clamber over fences and through discarded trash to go in the back way. And when the police address civilians, their tone can range from deeply respectful tenderness (toward the victim’s parents, in particular, who are addressed as “Auntie” and “Uncle” by the cops watching over the injured girl) to a strange form of antagonistic intimacy, as when they tell a fleeing perp that if he doesn’t come back, they will reveal his crimes to his family. There is something both wonderful and self-consciously appalling about the India this program portrays, and to me it feels very true to the stupendous, hair-raising, entrancing country that gave rise to it.