The BBC's Blue Lights has become the best thing on television right now, according to a reviewer who initially approached the series with caution. Three years after the drama first aired, the fourth series has cemented its reputation as unmissable primetime viewing.
The reviewer, writing for Wales Online, admitted to being wary when the BBC first announced the series. As someone from Northern Ireland, they know the place, the people, the history and the things that aren't always said out loud. It is not an easy place to write about, they noted, where a throwaway line can carry 50 years of history and where a street corner can mean something entirely different depending on who is standing on it.
Now on series four, the reviewer has found their answer: it is brilliant television. The writing is sublime, understanding that Northern Ireland is not a place where everyone neatly fits into one box. Politics, identity, policing, class, family and community are all tangled together, and rather than stopping to explain that, the series simply lets its characters live it.
Striking Opening Episode
The opening episode of the new series focused on an anti-immigration rally and was particularly striking. People from very different sides of the political divide were brought together in circumstances that felt both uncomfortable and recognisable.
There was no easy answer handed to the viewer. Instead, the drama allowed viewers to sit with the contradictions. The reviewer praised the show for holding up a mirror without telling you exactly what you are supposed to see in it.
While television did not predict those events, there was something striking about watching a drama engage so directly with the fault lines in modern Belfast, only to see those tensions playing out beyond the television screen.
Characters and Acting
The characters are not mouthpieces for competing political positions. They are people viewers can relate to, and that makes all the difference. The reviewer noted that viewers become invested in them, worry about them, get frustrated with them, and begin to understand why they make the decisions they do, even when they don't agree with them.
The acting is superb, with a naturalism to the performances that makes you forget you are watching actors performing a script. The characters don't feel like they were created simply to move a plot from A to B. They feel like people who existed before the cameras arrived and will continue to exist after they leave.
As Chief Inspector Helen McNally says in the final episode: "We can't have a future if we are not honest about the past."
More Than a Police Drama
It is a police drama with tension, danger and crime, but underneath all of that is a drama about people trying to navigate a society that is still working out how to live with its past while moving towards its future.
Northern Ireland is also a place where people are trying to get through a shift, raise their children, fall in love, make mistakes, pay the bills and work out who they are. The extraordinary exists alongside the completely ordinary.
The show entertains, makes viewers think, and sometimes makes them uncomfortable. All four series of Blue Lights are available to binge on BBC iPlayer now.
