Rent The Responder: Series 1 (2022)

Despite an outstanding Freeman & some gripping moments, this series is all over the place storywise - The Responder: Series 1 review by TB

This series arrived with enormous critical buzz, as well as some of my friends (including one who is a Scouser,) raving about it. And whilst there are absolutely some great points about it, overall it is a very mixed bag.

Chris Carson (Freeman) is a policeman based in Liverpool. On the surface, his life is perfect: beautiful wife, lovely daughter, great house. But the reality is anything but. The stresses of the job, alongside significant outside pressures, have left him constantly on the verge of having a breakdown. Then one night, he gets mixed up with Casey, a delinquent & extremely unreliable young woman who lives on the streets. Casey has stolen a huge haul of drugs & is being hunted. Chris takes it upon himself to try to help her, but quickly finding himself massively out of his depth. Alongside this, an old colleague with an axe to grind is also on the warpath...

Front & center of this drama, and the best thing about it, is Martin Freeman's performance. Like James McAvoy's transformation into Bruce Robertson for Filth, Freeman has left behind all of the previous characters he made his name playing & completely transformed himself into a burnt-out inner city policeman. Whether it is the accent (absolutely perfect & not in any way the hideous caricature that the Liverpudlian enunciation has been mangled before,) through to the physical characteristics, Freeman is never less than compelling.

The supporting characters are also great. Building on her incredible résumé, Myanna Buring is excellent as the policeman's wife whose soul has been extinguished due to the massive strain of living with & trying to love a man whose job is slowly destroying him, constantly worried that the next phone call will be the one to say he's never coming home again. Adelayo Adedayo is also great as Chris's new partner on the beat, a rookie who wants to do the right thing but quickly finds out that the job is far more than she bargained for.

Unfortunately, script-wise, there are some serious issues, the main one being that the series of events that are shown simply wouldn't happen in the way that they pan out. I absolutely appreciate that in these types of shows there is a level of dramatic licence that happens, but it just starts to stretch credulity to ridiculous lengths. Whether it is one character who repeatedly manages to get away despite multiple interactions with highly dangerous criminals, through to Chris's own behaviour which to any sane onlooker is extremely dubious, quite simply these sequences of events wouldn't happen.

And that is why this is never more than a 3 star series for me. When you are watching the screen & every 10 minutes or so find yourself thinking "That wouldn't happen, this wouldn't happen, there's no way things would turn out like that," then it becomes a bit annoying after a while, especially when in-between those moments there is a really gripping story being told.

See it for Freeman, but don't be surprised if by the end, you were left wanting more...