The last viewers saw of Chris Carson was his haunted gaze. The story arc of the first season of The Responder had been brought to a messy, morally ambiguous conclusion, but those eyes said it wasn’t over. For a few minutes of season two, it seems as if the troubled cop may have finally got it sorted – or at least that he’s on the way there. Then the walls start to close in.
Tony Schumacher, the writer and creator of the BBC hit and acclaimed Liverpool police drama (“I go mad when people call it a cop show – it’s not a cop show, it’s a people show”) reaches for a war metaphor to sum up the state of things.
“Chris was heavily traumatised. Lying in a shell hole, soaked full of mud, with his ears ringing,” he says. “He was dishevelled and confused – shellshocked by the things that he’d done and the lies that he’d told.
“Where we find him in season two is crawling out of that shellhole, thinking the war is over … only to discover it’s not, he is covered in mud, finding his feet, and looking to do it differently this time.”
One of the key strengths of The Responder is Martin Freeman’s lead performance: his ability to convey the war going on in Carson’s head underwrites the drama.
“I think what people relate to with Chris, and saw in Martin’s performance, was that he was a guy who was genuinely trying to do his best and trying to not to be a bad person,” says Schumacher. “I think that if Chris had been someone who had embraced the darkness inside him, people wouldn’t have liked him. He’s constantly fighting against the thing that makes him want to be bad, make bad decisions – and if you stick a few funny lines on the top of that, people can relate to him and actually like him.”
The second season introduces Carson’s father, played by the late Bernard Hill in what was his final role.
Freeman and Hill first got to know each other in New Zealand, when Hill (who played Théoden in the Lord of the Rings films) was on a return visit and Freeman was here filming The Hobbit.
Hill said before his death that he developed his character by watching Freeman’s performances and effectively reverse-engineering the father from the son.
Carson is not the only character battling himself. The Responders is a story of people trapped in the lives they’ve chosen – defending the public, but exhausted, corrupted and traumatised by the reality of that. Carson’s sidekick, probationary police officer Rachel Hargreaves (Adelayo Adedayo), has managed to leave an abusive relationship but can’t leave behind the psychological harm.
We also soon discover that Carson’s boss, DI Deborah Barnes, is not who she would wish to be. Amaka Okafor, who plays “Debs”, was originally written in to appear in a single episode, so coming back with a meatier storyline feels “like the gift I didn’t expect”, she says.
“I’ve got a good, juicy story in this series. The scripts felt juicier and more challenging for all of the characters. Tony is really good at lifting up the rock and allowing us to see all the insects underneath – everybody’s lives feel like they are hanging on a thread.
“Even for my character, who you feel has her stuff together, you see she’s actually a mess, too. Everyone’s a mess.”
Schumacher famously based The Responders on his own experiences as a British policeman. That job inspired not only the crime stories, he says, but the humour in the scripts that humanises his characters.
“In the police, if there was one thing you were always guaranteed to do when you were a cop, it was to laugh. Every single shift. You might cry, you might have a foot chase, you might sit all night and just stare into the night, but the fact of the matter is you would, at some point in that night, laugh.”
The Responder is streaming on TVNZ+ from June 2