Criminal: United Kingdom (3 episodes)

September 22, 2019 1:39 PM - Season 1 (Full Season)

Within the walls of an interrogation room and with time running out, London investigators go after 3 suspects. (Featuring David Tennant, Hayley Atwell, and Youssef Kerkour) (Netflix Original)

Episode 1 - Edgar: As time runs out, interrogators turn up the heat on a stone-faced doctor suspected of sexually assaulting and slaying his teenage stepdaughter.

Episode 2 - Stacey: With a shadowy colleague looking on, the team starts poking holes in the evolving story of a combative suspect accused of poisoning her brother-in-law.

Episode 3 - Jay: The team badgers a reticent truck driver to locate an abandoned trailer full of immigrants, but a new interrogator's poor decision jeopardizes it all.

Vulture - Netflix’s Criminal Is More Thought Experiment Than Crime Procedural

Collider ‘Criminal’ Review: An Intriguing Netflix Crime Drama Whose Parts Are Better Than the Sum

AV Club - A Law & Order of one’s own: Netflix delivers a satisfying procedural with Criminal

posted by oh yeah! (8 comments total)

I wasn't sure if the 12 episodes that make up the 4 different locations (UK, Spain, Germany, and France) were technically all one season -- when I submitted the show to the queue on Friday, the imdb verification only came up with the one "Criminal" result, even though it displayed as "Criminal: United Kingdom" on the imdb page, and searching for any of the other 3 titles (Criminal Spain, France, and Gernany) would redirect back to the "Criminal" page, and watching on Netflix it automatically played the Spain episodes after I finished watching these 3 and then on to Germany. But today it looks like imdb has stopped redirecting the shows into one page and has them separately. Originally I'd planned to post an episode 1 thread for these 3, then an episode 4, 7, and 10 for the other countries but, guess I'll wait and see how the URLs resolve.

I thought this was an ok enough procedural. Good actors and all, but, watching it in the same weekend as I watched Unbelievable makes it feel pretty hum-drum.
posted by oh yeah! at 1:59 PM on September 22, 2019

I just finished watching the first episode. The plot was a head-scratcher for me. How did he manage to get a girl beaten to an inch of her life to the car through the hotel after breakfast (walk? drag? carry?), past reception (?), and onto the parking lot and _into_ the boot of his car without anybody noticing the girl and her appearance?

If they had all the matching evidence of the hexagonal patterns on the cast and from the "exclusive" mat in the boot, why did not not mention in in 22 hours?
posted by techSupp0rt at 2:46 PM on September 22, 2019

Likewise, are we supposed to believe that gas stations will really clean a trunk well enough to evade modern forensics? And that the process of power washing the blood out of a car at a gas station would leave no witnesses and no camera footage?
posted by Pyry at 11:38 PM on September 22, 2019

Unrelated to the show itself, the Vulture and Collider reviews are so similar that I had to actually double check that I didn't accidentally open the same review twice: there aren't quite identical passages between the two, but there are certainly an eyebrow-raising number of very similar ones.

Collider:
The cast of criminals utilized to tell these stories run the gamut from the familiar (the aforementioned Tennant, Hayley Atwell, Nathalie Baye, and Jérémie Renier are among the most recognizable) to the relatively unknown for many international viewers. In that latter category and turning in especially admirable performances are Criminal: France‘s Sara Giraudeau, as a survivor of the Bataclan bombing whose story doesn’t quite hold up upon further inspection, and Criminal: Spain‘s Eduard Fernández, who plays a smooth-talking criminal one investigator has been gunning for for years.

Vulture:
The cast includes actors who are famed in their own country and beyond (including Hayley Atwell, Nathalie Baye, and Jérémie Renier), plus a mix of dependable character actors and relative newcomers. David Tennant makes a strong impression in the U.K. stretch of the show, as a polite but unnerving man accused of murdering his 13-year-old stepdaughter, with whom he might have had an inappropriate relationship. Criminal: France’s Sara Giraudeau plays a survivor of the Bataclan bombing whose story has some suspicious inconsistencies. Criminal: Spain has Eduard Fernández as a criminal who’s been the target of an ongoing criminal investigation for years but has always managed, like Al Capone back in the day, to slip through the coppers’ fingers.
posted by Pyry at 11:50 PM on September 22, 2019

Maybe copy-pasted from the press kit?
posted by Mogur at 2:58 AM on September 23, 2019

Ha, good catch, I didn't notice the similarity when I picked them. When I do the first post of a new series I generally look for reviews from the 'related articles' link on the show's imdb page - there weren't many to choose from, so I was mainly looking out for whether they were spoiler-y or general.

Yeah, the details of the Edgar crime don't really hold up to scrutiny in retrospect, and overall I'm not sure what the show is trying to say about morality/ethics in law enforcement. Mostly it seemed like a theater experiment or acting lab though, so, I don't know that they were trying to make any meaningful point beyond showcasing a bunch of good actors.
posted by oh yeah! at 5:24 AM on September 23, 2019

I really like the conceit of this series and how they use the same set for the different countries. Some storylines are definitely better than others though.
posted by orrnyereg at 9:17 AM on September 23, 2019

(including Hayley Atwell, Nathalie Baye, and Jérémie Renier)

Is Jeremy Renner pretending he's French now, perhaps in a snit over the trashing of his app?
posted by Naberius at 2:54 PM on September 23, 2019 [1 favorite]