Criminal Record Review

On paper, Criminal Record, AppleTV+’s new crime thriller, sounds like a sure bet. The series, which twists and turns through a rehashing of a past murder investigation that might have landed the wrong man in prison, stars the exceptional pairing of Peter Capaldi in the role of grizzled elder Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty and Cush Jumbo as the younger, more open-minded Detective Sergeant June Lenker, a pair of cops who end up at loggerheads over the ensuing investigation. Hegarty, who was involved in the original case over a decade earlier, is prone to throwing up roadblocks to stymie the new investigation, and Lenker, in the traditional role of the do-gooder who refuses to stop even when everyone around her begs her to, is unwilling to rest until she learns the truth – even if it means that she will up-end the lives of those from the original investigation only to discover the original investigation was correct all along.

And if that was all that the series was about – two actors, at the top of their game, going head-to-head in a race to determine the truth behind an old case – I suspect this would be one of the better shows of the first part of the year. As it is, Jumbo and Capaldi’s performances go a long way to softening the edges around a story that starts simple and quickly blows up to an unwieldy mess of plot points that often feel like they’ve been thrown in simply to allow the supporting cast a bit more to do while the two leads are forced to wait episode after episode to fully complete their arcs.*

*While watching the series, I often wondered if it would have been better as a film, as so much of the excess story feels like bloat around what could have been a rather sharply built tale of a potentially crooked cop going up against a naïve one to solve an old crime. A great deal of the story goes round in circles – and random plot points are added and then thrown away – in order to prevent Lenker from getting too close to the right answer too soon.

The writing in Criminal Record comes from the more is better school of plot, leading to a story that often loses sight of the central arc its telling. It’s a disappointment considering the work done by Jumbo, who is incredibly effective as a woman in a man’s world, juggling a complicated home life along with the perils of being a woman of color on a police force still controlled by white men of a certain age. And Capaldi does a great job of making Hegarty both suspicious and empathetic – our look into his home life offers a nice dichotomy to his work persona. I just wish the writing was able to fully put its trust in these two characters to carry the story. If there was a greater belief that the clash between the pair and their conflicting styles of work (along with Lenker’s own investigation putting Hegarty under a microscope while the duo also attempt to follow leads in a wholly new case that is forcing them to work together), this could have been a barn burner of a tale.

Criminal Record premiers on AppleTV+ on January 10. All eight episodes were provided for review.