We Like: “Line of Duty”

Last year, audiences in the UK—and to a lesser extent, the U.S.—went wild over one of the latest TV phenomena that seem to pop up a couple times a year. This time it was Bodyguard, a show starring Game of Thrones’s Richard Madden as a personal protection officer (or, you know, colloquially, a bodyguard), who gets tied up in a tense and intricate set of terrorist and political plots. I enjoyed Bodyguard greatly, and was not surprised to see, when the credits rolled, that it was the brainchild of writer/producer Jed Mercurio.

Mercurio also created one of my favorite series of recent years, the phenomenal Line of Duty, which just concluded its fifth season. It’s not often I’d describe a series as “gripping,” but Line of Duty definitely fits the bill. The series follows police anticorruption unit AC-12, which is dedicated to investigating compromised police officers. Each six-episode season follows a different case, but as the series goes on, we—along with the protagonists—start to realize that there’s a larger pattern at play here.…