Blue Lights, now in its fourth series, might just be the best thing on television, according to a reviewer from Northern Ireland who initially approached the BBC drama with caution.
The writer, Cathy Owen, said she was interested but wary when the show was announced in 2023, given the difficulty of portraying a place where a throwaway line can carry 50 years of history and where the past has a habit of turning up in the present.
Writing and Acting Praised
Owen said the writing is sublime and the acting superb, with a naturalism that makes viewers forget they are watching performers. The characters do not feel like mouthpieces for competing political positions but like people viewers can relate to, she added.
The drama understands that Northern Ireland is not a place where everyone neatly fits into one box, with politics, identity, policing, class, family and community all tangled together. Instead of stopping to explain this, it lets its characters live it.
Engaging With Modern Belfast
The opening episode of the new series focused on an anti-immigration rally, bringing people from different sides of the political divide together in circumstances that felt both uncomfortable and recognisable. No easy answer was handed to the viewer, allowing the drama to sit with the contradictions.
Owen noted there was something striking about watching a drama engage so directly with fault lines in modern Belfast, only to see those tensions playing out beyond the television screen.
More Than the Past
The drama also gets something else right, Owen said: there is more to Northern Ireland than its past. The history matters, but people are also trying to get through a shift, raise children, fall in love, make mistakes, pay bills and work out who they are.
As Chief Inspector Helen McNally says in the final episode: "We can't have a future if we are not honest about the past."
All four series of Blue Lights are available to binge on BBC iPlayer now.
