Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Crime’ On BritBox, Where Dougray Scott Plays A Police Detective Trying To Find A Missing Girl (2024)

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Irvine Welsh's Crime

  • Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Crime’ On BritBox, Where Dougray Scott Plays A Police Detective Trying To Find A Missing Girl (1)

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We’ve seen enough British police procedurals lately to know that they tend to hang on both the performance of the leading actor and how that actor’s character is drawn. They’re not really ensembles, because the issues that main character is going through infiltrates every decision he or she makes on a case. In a new BritBox series, the main detective dominates so much, it’s hard to find any other character that doesn’t make us shrug. But is that enough?

CRIME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A photo of a teenage girl in a school uniform. As we pull back, we hear “Brit, you’re going to be late! Britney, you need to be leaving now!”

The Gist:We see Britney Hamil (Paige Green) walking to school in Edinburgh, trailed by two classmates who are bullying her. She walks past a white van, then suddenly disappears. An old man looks on.

DI Ray Lennox (Dougray Scott) and his partner, Eddie Rodgers (Gordon Kennedy) get sent to a scene where two young French tourists are found naked, with belts around their necks. Rodgers assumes that they just died via kinky S&M play. But Lennox thinks the killings have the earmarks of a case he was on years ago, the Confectioner killings. But the case is handed to Dougie Gillman (Jamie Sives), who derisively calls “Froggy goes a-courtin'”.

Rodgers is retiring to Florida, so Lennox is partnered up with just-promoted DS Amanda Drummond (Joanna Vanderham). They’re called to the scene of Britney Hamil’s disappearance. As they talk to her mother Angela (Emma Hartley-Miller) and try to figure out who might have taken her, Drummond promises Angela that they’ll find her, dredging up Lennox’s ire; you don’t make promises in cases like this. Drummond thinks he undermined her in front of Angela, for which he later apologizes.

While the old man standing near the white van, Tommy Loughran (Ian Hanmore) is a registered sex offender and an obvious suspect, but nothing really fits. Britney’s father Ronnie (Tam Dean Burn) is nowhere to be found, and Angela was seen drinking with a colleague she didn’t tell the detectives about. When Ronnie, a drunk who lives in squalor, doesn’t work out, the attention turns to the friend.

But Lennox can’t get the Confectioner, Robert Ellis (Kris Hitchen), out of his mind, despite the fact that he was convicted of two of his murders and is rotting in prison. He is also fixating on a yellow piece of notebook paper found near the scene, despite the fact that the paper could have come from anywhere.

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Crime’ On BritBox, Where Dougray Scott Plays A Police Detective Trying To Find A Missing Girl (2)

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Crime has a lot of the feel of Law & Order: Organized Crime, mostly in the way Scott’s character, who gets obsessed with the case at hand along with the ones that got away from him in the past, resembles Chris Meloni’s intense Elliot Stabler.

Our Take: Crimewas adapted by Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanaugh from Welsh’s novel of the same name, and it all pretty much hangs on the intense performance of Scott as Lennox. The rest of the show feels like a standard UK police procedural, and one without a particularly interesting set of supporting characters. But Scott’s performance makes up for a lot of the show’s generic structure.

It’s sort of tough to suss out from the first episode, but what we do know about Lennox is that he’s rebuilding his life since the Confectioner was caught. The case sent him down the road of depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and we still see him screaming about evil at AA meetings. Also, there are scenes where Lennox is tuning out whoever is speaking to him and has to deal with the buzzing in his head that more or less tortures him.

He has Trudi (Angela Griffin), a new woman in his life, but she doesn’t know the extent of how these cases have troubled him — she finds out quickly when she opens a locked room in his flat and sees a massive pin-and-string board connecting the various Confectioner cases with Britney Hamil’s disappearance.

What we’re wondering if Scott will be enough to carry the miniseries over its six episodes. The only other cat member who has potential to gain more than a one-dimensional personality is Vanderham as DS Drummond, his new partner. The fact that she is able to stand up to him and get him to apologize is a mark in her favor, but for now, we’re not sure what she’ll do to keep Lennox in check besides telling him to “follow the trail that’s hot, not one that’s cold.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Britney Hamil’s body is seen propped up on a column in a park. We see the white van drive away and Lennox’s voice says that evil people “don’t want redemption. They know they’re on the road to hell, and they just want to drag as many souls with them along the way.”

Sleeper Star: We mentioned Vanderham above; her character is really the only one who is not a caricature and might be able to go toe to toe with Lennox.

Most Pilot-y Line: One of the things that led to some of the confusion we felt in the first episode was everyone’s thick Scottish accents; you may want subtitles be your friend for this one.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re on board forCrime for Dougray Scott’s lead performance. The rest of the series feels like it could be from any procedural we’ve seen on either side of the Atlantic.

Will you stream or skip the Dougray Scott detective series #Crime on @BritBox_US? #SIOSI

— Decider (@decider) December 14, 2021

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.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Crime’ On BritBox, Where Dougray Scott Plays A Police Detective Trying To Find A Missing Girl (2024)
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