By SCOTT MacLEOD
Police corruption, a maggot-infested corpse, small-time crooks and a drug-taking constable ... quite a start to TV3's new British police drama The Cops (9.30 pm).
And all that was after the first scene which showed a scantily clad young lass snorting speed in a pumping nightclub toilet at 5 am, dashing to a taxi, pulling rings from her nose and belly, apologising for being late and donning ... her police uniform.
By the end of last Friday's first episode it was clear that the most dodgy characters were those in blue uniforms. Apart from PC Mel Droper's fondness for amphetamines, we had old-time bobby Roy plant drugs on a local crook, police brutality, rampant flirting, and frequent use of words that cannot be printed here. The baddies? They stole flowers and forgot to look after dad.
This BBC series is set firmly in the tradition of gritty British realism and weds it with excellent actors, sharp scripts and flashes of irony and humour.
It invites comparison with American mafia drama The Sopranos but is less blatantly clever. The many plotlines spill into later episodes, rather than resolving tidily at the end of each show.
Ongoing examples include a new hardline sergeant aiming to crack down on sloppiness, a dead pensioner, Roy's evidence-planting and a randy pathologist. Negatives are the unrelentingly grim, overcast streets of the fictional northern town of Stanton, and the general feeling of depression one gets from watching too much of this kind of stuff.
Sensitive viewers may also feel a little dizzy from the wild, handheld camera style fashionable with studios aiming either to evoke the look of an intimate pseudo-documentary or save money on tripods.
Weight is added to the latter theory by the spurning of an expensive soundtrack or anything much in the way of opening credits. And that's good, because this show doesn't need them.
But the cash-saving theory fails to explain the amount of effort put into many subtle touches that lift the programme above our usual crime fare.
Example: PC Droper walks into a room containing a man who has been dead for six weeks. The room is chokka with flies. Hundreds of them. And they're real.
The main theme is encapsulated by Droper's assertion that, "I'm a police officer and I can do what I like."
Roy also does what he likes. Other characters spend most of their time either trying to do what they like or stopping other people from stopping them from doing what they like.
Romance has so far been restricted to the pathologist's efforts in chatting up Droper over the fly-ridden corpse. "Want to come back to our office and see our back catalogue? It'll make yer skin crawl ... " But tonight's episode gets steamier. It also has the funniest scene so far, involving the pathologist and a splattered corpse, "heil Hitler!"
Overseas, critics liked The Cops and on early evidence it may prove to be up there with the best British police shows.
TV: Cops who do as they wish
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