Why British Police Shows Are Better

When you take away guns and shootings, you have more time to explore grief, guilt, and the psychological complexity of crime.

- By Christopher Orr

The British detective story is enjoying a golden age unparalleled since the days of Agatha Christie or perhaps even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The heroes of the current era are not the preternaturally gifted, idiosyncratic dabblers of old—not, as Sherlock Holmes preferred to describe himself, “consulting detectives.” They are professional detectives—or to be more precise, detective sergeants, detective inspectors, detective chief inspectors, and so on. And they are principally found not on the written page, but on the small screen.

While American viewers shake off the hangover from our long bender of forensic TV franchises (did I only imagine Law & Order: Special Veterinary Unit and CSI: Wichita?), Britain has been doing a booming export business in tidy, ruminative detective series: Broadchurch, Happy Valley, Shetland, Unforgotten, River, Vera, The Loch, Hinterland, and more. Reliable viewership numbers are hard to come by, but if you begin questioning friends and family, before long you’re likely to discover a semi-fanatical devotee of the genre among them.

These series are police-centered, featuring one or two officers operating within a larger departmental structure of (mostly) able lieutenants and (frequently) obstructive higher-ups. Many of them are concerned with the ugliest of crimes—murder, forced prostitution, pedophilia. Yet what makes them distinctive is their refusal to wallow in grimness, instead stepping back to make room for emotions such as grief and guilt and faith and redemption in a manner not at all typical of American cop fare. To watch these shows during a period of real-life police turmoil has only made the transatlantic contrast more vivid.