Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Criminal Record’ On Apple TV+, Where Peter Capaldi And Cush Jumbo Are Cops At Odds Over A 13-Year-Old Murder Case

One of the hardest parts of this job is to pinpoint what we like or don’t like about a series. Even harder is pinpointing what is making us lukewarm about a show. “Meh” is a lot harder to explain than “I loved it” or “I hated it.” A new British cop thriller on Apple TV+ isn’t quite “Meh,” but it’s not quite in the “I loved it” category, either.

CRIMINAL RECORD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A car drives at night on a highway through London.

The Gist: In the car, a man is driving a couple around town. He’s been hired as a driver and personal protection for someone who is apparently a VIP. He tells the couple he’s still an active police detective, but does this side hustle as a way to get out of the office. When prompted for some good stories, he tells a couple of gruesome ones, including one about a guy tied up by robbers on Christmas, who wasn’t found until sometime in January.

As the car passes by an East London phone box, a woman in a hoodie runs in and frantically calls an operator looking for the police. She won’t give her name, however.

The next morning, DS June Lenker (Cush Jumbo) gets the recording of that call and is told to look into it more. The frantic woman is eventually connected to a dispatcher named Jasmine Peters (Chizzy Akudolu), who tries to keep her on the line while she sends out a unit to her scene. The woman keeps saying that the boyfriend who stabbed her is also bragging that he stabbed a former girlfriend years ago with the same knife. Just as the patrol unit gets to her location, the line goes silent.

Lenker looks at the CCTV in the area and sees that the woman got spooked and left, but loses track of where she went after that. She discusses the call with Jasmine, who felt that the frantic woman didn’t sound like she was making up the whole thing about her boyfriend killing an old girlfriend years before. She also claims that someone else is in prison doing a 24-year stretch for the murder. Lenker, who worked in the DV unit for years before being transferred to CID, wonders if the claims are more of a lash-out on the part of the victim, but considers Jasmine’s opinion as she looks more into the claims.

She does some research and finds the case of Errol Mathis (Tom Moutchi), who was sentenced to 24 years for murdering Adelaide Burrowes in 2012. She asks her boss if she could look into it, and he tells her to e-mail the detective in charge of the case, DCI Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi), who works out of Hackney Downs. Instead she goes to the station and meets with the veteran detective in person.

When he hears Mathis’ name, Hegarty immediately says he was a “Poor man’s O.J.,” a crack that takes Lenker by surprise. He’s pretty dismissive of the claims, especially because Burrowes’ son Patrick, six years old at the time, heard the entire thing. He then upbraids her for breaking protocol as she leaves.

Lenker isn’t convinced, and was put off a bit by Hegarty’s “Poor man’s O.J.” remark. Hegarty, for his part, goes to a mysterious location and tells someone to watch their back. The next day, Lenker finds that her access to the police files is suspended pending an investigation into her usage, which she attributes directly to Hegarty’s influence. She decides to keep looking into the Mathis case, taking to an investigator named Sonya Singh (Aysha Kala); Sonya tells her that the physical evidence used to convict Mathis was misidentified, and that Hegarty and his “crew” — called the Sixty-Twos — might have had an “agenda.”

In the meantime, we see Patrick Burrowes (Rasaq Kukoyi), who is now 18, being intercepted on his way to work in the kitchen of a restaurant; a social worker tells him that Mathis wants to talk to him. In Patrick’s memories of the day, he still makes the connection that Mathis killed his mother, and the confession that Lenker hears Mathis give Hegarty back in 2011 seems to confirm this. But when the mystery woman from the other night calls in again, the case takes a new deadly turn.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Criminal Record has the tone of most standard British cop series. Since this one involves a cold case, we were reminded of Sherwood.

Our Take: Criminal Record, created by Paul Rutman, could be an intriguing show about a face-off between Jumbo’s and Capaldi’s characters. But after the first episode, we’re not convinced that Rutman has the two of them on even footing at the beginning of this story. As we watched the first episode, we were interested in seeing more of Jumbo’s character June Lenker and much less of Capaldi’s character Daniel Hegarty.

Why? Because Lenker is young but not so young that she doesn’t have experience as a cop, and her experience has given her the ability to look at cases like the anonymous caller with a critical eye instead of a dismissive one.

On the other hand, Hegarty feels like a slightly elevated version of the racist cop trope we’ve seen a million times. As we follow him around watching him cover his tracks with regards to the Mathis case, we just didn’t care all that much about what he was doing. To be sure, Capaldi does his best to make Hegarty more than just the usual blustery racist detective, and there are scenes that hint there is more to his story than the first episode indicates — for instance, his side hustle of being protection for VIPs has to be part of this story, or else it just seems like a character quirk. He also comes back to his brownstone and sees a young woman crashed on a couch. Is it is daughter? Someone else? All we see is a tattooed ankle.

However, we do want to see Lenker defy the influence of Hegarty and expose him and the rest of the “Sixty-twos”. It seems like she’s going to be trying to find the man the anonymous woman said was after her in that initial call, and along with that she’s going to show that Hegarty and company pried a confession out of Mathis using methods that will likely get them in deep trouble. As she goes through this case, how it plays into her perspective of institutional racism where she works will be the most interesting part of the series.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: After seeing the woman who initially called in plummet do her death, Lenker runs into the building and goes up to the 9th floor unit she made her second call from.

Sleeper Star: Aysha Kala as Sonya Singh, because in her scene with Jumbo, she is shoveling forkfuls of beans and toast into her mouth like a real person would, instead of the tiny bits of food we usually see people eat in those sort of scenes. We’re pretty sure Singh was tired of beans and toast at the end of that day of shooting.

Most Pilot-y Line: Some weirdly extraneous scenes in the first episode, like Lenker’s partner Leo (Stephen Campbell Moore) running to hand her her phone as she leaves for work, then telling her her top’s inside out. Lenker just takes it off right there in the street, and jokes with Leo, “You’re loving this, aren’t you?”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Cush Jumbo and her character are the reasons why we’re going to keep watching Criminal Record. Not that we hate Peter Capaldi’s character, but at the outset he feels much more generic than Jumbo’s character, and given that the two of them face off during the entire season, that could end up being a big problem.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.