TV
Policing the truth: Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo return to a higher-stakes ‘Criminal Record’ Season 2
By Adrian Gomez
For the Journal
Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo enjoyed filming the first season of “Criminal Record,” and the award-winning duo couldn’t wait to step back into Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Hegarty’s and Detective Sgt. June Lenker’s shoes.
“(June’s) moved on a bit, risen up the ranks and learned a lot,” Jumbo says. “It’s always comforting to play someone you know well but also see how they will deal with new challenges.”
Those challenges include Hegarty’s proposal that they work together again.
“She reluctantly agrees but knows that she can’t trust him, not completely. But the job is always bigger than her feelings,” Jumbo says.
Capaldi, meanwhile, embraced the opportunity to revisit his character’s elusive qualities. “There is always something more to know about Hegarty,” Capaldi says. “There is an ambiguity to the character. And that is one of the attractions of playing him. He is full of unknowns.”
The second season of “Criminal Record” is streaming on Apple TV. A new episode airs each Wednesday through June 10.
According to Apple TV, “Criminal Record” is set in the heart of contemporary London, exploring the impossibility of policing when the truth is up for grabs.
In Season 2, when a young man is stabbed to death at a political rally, rival police officers Lenker and Hegarty are forced into an uneasy alliance. But what starts as a hunt for a murderer escalates into an undercover operation to foil a far-right bomb plot in the heart of London.
Dustin Demri-Burns, Luca Pasqualino, Luther Ford, Lyndsey Marshal and Peter Sullivan join the cast in addition to the returning ensemble that includes Shaun Dooley, Stephen Campbell Moore and Charlie Creed-Miles.
Jumbo says during this season June is determined to find the killer and, in her hunt, is drawn into an intelligence operation run by Hegarty, under the promise that she’ll get her man.
As she starts to uncover the true history of the operation, the fragile trust between the two adversaries begins to buckle — and the whole case risks falling apart.
Jumbo says the first season explored whether justice could ever be served when the past itself was contested, building a complex narrative from the fragmented memories of those involved.
The arc for the second season focuses on both main characters and the terms of their thorny relationship with each other.
“We wanted to keep the issues pretty nuanced so there was always a worry that it might be too much of a slow burn,” Elaine Collins, executive producer, says about the way the first season’s story unfolded. “It was lovely when the audience got on board and stayed with us until the end.”
Season 2 plunges June and Hegarty into the immediacy of the unfolding crisis.
“This season has less of a procedural and more of a thriller heartbeat,” Paul Rutman, executive producer and writer, says. “June comes up against some familiar obstacles — in the shape of Hegarty — and some baffling new ones. We wanted to touch on many of the themes of the here and now, such as how news becomes transmuted into fake news and facts into alternative facts.”