British Crime Dramas with Older and Younger Viewers

British Police Programmes

Last night my youngest son and I were searching for something on the television.  The criteria were that it had to be something we had not seen on Netflix and it could not be a farce.  In the end, we settled on a British police drama, Paranoid. Paranoid is about a group of police investigating a murder of a mother in a playground in full view of many, many children.  The vicious assailant, this was a knife attack, wears a hoodie and flees off into the distance after the incident.

My son at about the 15-minute mark began to go on about the nature of British police dramas. He was aggravated by their tendency to be very talky and to provide tons of exposition in lieu of actual action.  He reeled off vehicles like Inspector Lewis and the David Tenant abducted child thriller of recent years. 

He is right.  A great deal of the story progress in these tele dramas comes from the actors talking about the individual officer’s personal crises and the social reasons for the abhorrent state of life in the UK.  The thing is I enjoy the dialog, the conversation.  It deals with stress and anxiety and the whys of things.  I guess that is the difference between being 19 years old and 60 years old.  At 19 you want people to get on with it, to show you a story with cinematography and with guns and action.  At 60 you want to hear why things have played out as they have. Yeah aging changes your perspective.