Criminal UK: Season 2 premiered on 16th September 2020. The series guest stars Kit Harington, Kunal Nayyar, Sharon Horgan, and Sophie Okonedo as individuals brought into the precinct for interrogation. The series is directed by Jim Field Smith and features a recurring cast from Season 1- Katherine Kelly, Lee Inglesby, Rochenda Sandall and Shubham Saraf.
Interrogation Room and Criminals…
Criminal: Season 2 is set in a police interrogation room where suspects Julia Bryce (Sophie Okonedo), Alex Daniels (Kit Harington), Danielle Dunne (Sharon Horgan) and Sandeep Singh (Kunal Nayyar) are brought in for interrogation for murder, alleged rape, improper communication, and double murder respectively.
Criminal is a very short series. Usually, crime series range from 8-12 episodes but Criminal has a total of 7 episodes in both the seasons, with Season 2 being just 4 episodes long with each episode about 45 minutes. The series is crisp and engaging and when each suspect looks like they did nothing, but they might as well have, it keeps you on the edge throughout.
Out of the four episodes, my favourite has to be the first and the fourth episodes, revolving around murder, with Julia Bryce and Sandeep Singh as the suspects. Since all the episodes are set in the interrogation room, it comes down to all the actors carrying the narrative in a way that doesn’t look or feel restricted or boring. Surprisingly, the series does that really well.
Though the series makes police work look fairly simple as no groundwork is shown, but it does a good job showing the interrogation room saga. You see the moral high-ground that the criminals take but they are dirty in their deeds, especially in episode 3.
In an overall view, the episodes are engaging, yes. But coming down to the questions posed is another criteria that add to the whole thing. The questions posed are coherent and are open to various answers and interpretation. The suspects use this to their advantage very well and their answers are stringent, well planned, and clever and as soon as you feel they are unbreakable, the team works their tactical charm to their advantage.
Talking particularly about Episode 2, which had Alex Daniels (Kit Harington) as the key suspect – it revolves around a rape allegation. However, Daniels is found not guilty as it is his word against the said victim who also has a bad history. He is, thus, set free.
One thing in this episode, other than Harington’s opening monologue that is just perfect, is how he asks the officers to come down to his office and tell everyone and the women in his family that he didn’t do it. That his image is now tarnished forever with a sexual predator tag. His performance and the ending part of the episode is so impactful it leaves you to think about the consequences of false allegations and how they affect an individual in every way possible.
Stream It or Skip It
STREAM IT! Criminal UK: Season 2 is an engaging and worth-watching series you really won’t want to miss. Though the series is not exactly a brain-teasing, solving-crimes-on-the-ground kind of series and is set in a simple interrogation room the whole time, it is still worth your time.
The series makes fair use of sound and setting. The reductive sound adds the whole mood of the series and adds to the suspense that is built around each suspect. The sound, being an essential cue of film-making, is used in the series well and the series uses extra-diegetic, homo-diegetic and intra-diegetic sound with perfect balance.
Criminal UK: Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
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