BritBox

 The Beloved Spouse™ and I recently subscribed to BritBox to take advantage of its plethora of outstanding crime shows. We’re three series in and, of course, I have thoughts.

 

Line of Duty. I’d heard enough good about this one that it piqued my interest in BritBox in the first place. Outstanding in every regard, LoD follows Anti-Corruption Unit 12 (AC-12) in a fictional English Midlands city, based on Birmingham. AC units are England’s version of Internal Affairs in the States, and the show focuses on a different angle of police corruption in each season. There is more to say, but noting the common thread that runs between seasons (and occasionally shows wear as time goes on) is a potential spoiler, so I’ll leave that for now. Suffice to say, LoD gets high marks.

 

Karen Pirie. Another winner, if only one season long so far. Based in St. Andrews, Scotland, Karen is a young detective who is assigned to a cold case as a way of brushing off the investigation because she’s both inexperienced and a woman. Needless to say, while Karen is young and inexperienced, she’s also smart and dogged. The quality here is just as good as Line of Duty, with one caveat: you might want to turn on the subtitles. While not Glasgow, the St. Andrews accents are at times indecipherable. We watched the first episode and thought it was okay, then watched again with the subtitles turned on, turned to each other, and said, “Whoa. This is good.”

 

Wallander. One of the two crime series I’d heard a lot about before subscribing to BritBox, along with Prime Suspect, which we haven’t got around to yet. Each episode is a 90-minute movie based on a single novel by Swedish author Henning Mankell, not unlike the series created for Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor. (Exception: the last two episodes come from the same book, a la the end of the Harry Potter movies.) Filmed on location in Sweden with UK actors, the show stars Kenneth Branagh as Wallander, a detective in the resort town of Ystad who seems to discover more bodies than he’s assigned. Broody and dark, Wallander’s inherent goodness and fallibility come through to make him as human a cop as one is likely to find. As one might expect, Branagh is superb. I’ll have more to say about Wallander, but in a different post, as there will be spoilers.

 

You can’t go wrong with any of these. The only complaint we have with BritBox is the service itself, which some nights makes us kiss ass to watch it; some nights we give up. It’s more reliable on a laptop, but I’m paying for a service to watch its programming on a screen the size of those made before I was born when I have a 65-inch television across the room. Not with my eyesight.