Responder at Last Gets the Call

One of the year’s most acclaimed BBC dramas at last will screen in NZ, initially on TVNZ OnDemand.

The first season of The Responder will stream in full from June 2 — nearly six months after its UK premiere excited critics like The Guardian’s:

Martin Freeman is magnificent in tour de police force … With rage in his heart and spit on his face, Freeman will surely win all the awards for this drama written by an ex-cop that’s as riveting as a thriller and as profound as a documentary.

He plays Chris Carson, a crisis-stricken and morally compromised first responder who’s pushed to the brink over a week’s worth of increasingly tense, life-changing night shifts.

Radio Times also awarded the five-part series a five-star review, praising it as “the anti-Line of Duty“:

Writer Tony Schumacher once worked as a response policeman himself and that life experience is plain to see here, resulting in complex scripts that provide an unflinching look at the limitations of the system. Where Line of Duty has always argued the importance of holding officers to the letter of the law, The Responder hits back with a thought-provoking counterpoint, presenting situations that expose when procedure isn’t fit for purpose. Time and again, Schumacher finds unsettling grey areas to send his story, where every decision packs devastating consequences dragging Chris into even deeper water.

Said The Spectator: “All in all, I can’t think of many TV characters that you simultaneously root for and are horrified by as strongly as this since the glory days of Tony Soprano.”

Closer to home, the Sydney Morning Herald declared: “The trope of the TV cop pushed to the brink could barely be any more well-trodden, but in this astonishing series … Freeman manages to infuse the cliche with disturbingly believable humanity.”

Australians didn’t have to wait as long as us to see it, either, with SBS premiering The Responder three months ago.