Blue Lights series two review – last year’s breakout police hit is as beautifully tense as ever | Blue Lights

Is it a stretch to name Blue Lights, which is again for season two, the UK’s reply to The Wire? Properly, sure. In all honesty that may be a bit a lot – it’s extra like a cross between The Wire and Holby Metropolis. However the police drama was one of many breakout hits of 2023 as a result of, beneath the soapy floor of its interactions between rookie cops, it has a clear-eyed, humane view of policing as an not possible job. No matter we would consider the pressure usually, a mixture of societal breakdown on the streets and corruption/mismanagement within the corridors of energy makes any try to hold a badge and keep order a futile gesture, like standing on a seaside attempting to mop away the tide. Because it was in Baltimore, so it’s in Belfast.

Blue Lights comes at this recipe for bracingly pessimistic drama from a selected angle, sitting itself because it does in trendy Northern Eire. We’re post-Troubles, which is to say that the schisms and resentments that brought on the Troubles are nonetheless there, being fastidiously – or maybe not so fastidiously – managed to forestall embers once more changing into flames. Season one revolved across the police’s battle with a neighborhood Republican crime household, the McIntyres, who it turned out have been being propped up by the British safety providers, that means any effort to do the easy work of arresting these criminals for committing crimes was met with the present’s insidious catchphrase, “double-oh bee”. Messing with MI5’s mysterious and doubtless misguided work was, for the standard bobby on the beat, out of bounds.

A 12 months on from the McIntyres’ fall, the area they left on the prime of Belfast’s drug-dealing hierarchy has been crammed by … we’re unsure. However by the top of the primary episode we all know that it’s not simply Catholics who’ve a difficulty with former troopers changing into crime bosses. But whereas Blue Lights as soon as handled medication as a mere side-effect of previous rivalries rumbling on, now they’re a stark image of society fragmenting. The primary two call-outs for our police constable pals are a tough sleeper mendacity in a park, lifeless from a heroin overdose, and a pharmacist being threatened by a younger man whose methadone prescription hasn’t come by means of. “These final six months,” says the pharmacist, cowering behind toughened glass, “it’s simply determined individuals screaming at me.”

The brand new realities of a troubled metropolis are summed up in a scene that follows the basic Blue Lights method. Two “peelers” in a squad automotive obtain information on their radios of a violent home disturbance. They nee-nah it over to the home in query. We maintain our breath as they enter, not realizing what peril lies in wait. Quickly, although, as a result of Blue Lights takes a rosy view of how resourceful and sympathetic particular person law enforcement officials are – nearly everybody on this fictional pressure is an idealistic champion of susceptible individuals – the cops have talked down and befriended a person who’s smashing up his residence as a result of he’s deep in private disaster. He’s not dangerous or harmful in any respect: the issue is that he has been ready months for a psychological well being evaluation. “Fuck’s sake,” says Constable Annie Conlon (Katherine Devlin). “Is all the pieces simply fucked?”

Its reward for plain talking is one factor that makes Blue Lights such rewarding drama, however the tough political truths are softened by a weak spot for that staple of escapist emergency-services soaps, the office romance. Annie is on patrol with new recruit Shane Bradley (Frank Blake) – she’s already loved by chance seeing him shirtless again on the station, and now he’s expertly defused a harmful scenario with sensitivity and crafty.

We will add Annie’s lust for Shane to a listing that, in season one, included a bootleg affair fuelled by disgrace, a profound love ended tragically by demise, and the fragile will-they-won’t-they of the 2 characters who nearly stand out as our favourites from a wonderful ensemble: Grace (Sian Brooke), a former social employee who insists on bringing her previous job’s mild methods into the more durable world of policing, and the extra skilled, extra cynical Stevie (Martin McCann). For a very long time, Grace has mocked Stevie’s behavior of consuming scrumptious selfmade canapes out of plastic containers within the automotive they journey in collectively – a scene within the new episode, the place she snaps open her personal Tupperware and gives him a deal with she’s inexpertly baked for him, is an unstated “I really like you” of the sort Blue Lights does so fantastically.

By the point the credit roll, although, any Grace/Stevie shippers have been smacked across the head by a correctly noticed actuality test about what the pair’s relationship is de facto primarily based on. In exhausting instances, Blue Lights continues to skip deftly between mild and darkish.