With the various police procedurals available online, it can feel like an oversaturated genre, at best. At worst, with the struggles the world has to do with regards to the justice system, police procedurals can glorify the institution. Criminal Record examines this, but it doesn’t give the easy answers other shows have when discussing the systemic failure of the police, especially when it comes to race, age, and sex. Peter Capaldi stands in as the old guard, though his skin-crawling presence keeps Dan Hegarty’s real intentions an enigma until the very end. However, it’s Cush Jumbo as the empathetic June Lenker that drives the show, with her persistence meeting Hegarty’s every move, and her frustrations mirroring the real rage the world feels with regards to past injustices. The way the two clash creates a novel rookie-veteran dynamic that makes Criminal Record so striking.

While the crimes in Criminal Record are fictional, the systemic hurdles placed to keep certain groups of people from justice are quite real, but like in Lenker’s case, very nebulous to pin down definitively. The audit Lenker goes through may be random, and the questions Hagerty asked her could come across as regular concern, and the monitored interview could just be procedure, but the timing for all of these instances feels too suspicious to be anything else other than what Lenker (and the audience) concludes. Showrunner Paul Rutman uses this gap between action and intent to maximize the show’s mystery– putting the audience through the same paces Lenker does while she tries to solve the case.