Following one multi-stranded investigation over five hours Line Of Duty sees Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) transferred to AC-12 a fictional anti-corruption unit after a mistaken shooting during a counter-terrorist operation. Alongside Detective Constable Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure) they are assigned to lead an investigation into the alleged corruption by a popular and successful officer Detective Chief Inspector Tony Gates (Lennie James). While Gates cleverly manipulates his units figures DS Arnott questions whether Gates is being made a scapegoat for a culture of institutionalised spin or is guilty of darker corruption
Review
Last year the BBC brought us the superb slightly strange police thriller 'The Shadow Line' this year the rather more conventional 'The Line of Duty' has aired. Aspects of this programme are quite good although it never feels exactly fresh. Anticorruption units and undercover agents have been on our screen before ('Between the Lines' there's clearly something magnetic about that word 'line' and 'The Ghost Squad') and some of the conspiracy elements seem both far fetched and perfunctory. Perhaps the greatest problem is that Lennie James' protagonist is a hard man to connect with an almostclean copper brought down by a bad friend he remains a hard man to like and while he appears to be driven by his own private sense of ethics this moral code seems completely selfcentred he's torn when he fails to live up to his own expectations of himself but it's hard to see why we should care. And the portrait of feral kids on the local housing estate seems both lazy and again relatively loosely connected to the more serious crime in the background if you're looking for the forensic detail of 'The Wire' you won't find it here. None of this actually makes for a bad series it does all the standard things you expect a show of this sort to do reasonably well but it doesn't add much you won't have seen before.