Justice

I started watching this, and stuck with it in the hope that it would improve as the episodes went by. It did not! The story line is a pointless one that seems to go back and forth without ever resolving issues. Particularly annoying is the editing that uses 2 second screen shots, scattered throughout each episode that are irrelevant to the main scene. This began with the first episode and just made the story line even more confusing. Characters seemed disconnected and it took forever (and many episodes) to piece together what was happening. For a series with such a small payoff, it is a chore to get through it. One suspects that the creators were hoping for a second series but that apparently did not happen.

Despite that, the cast is strong and the story threads are interesting.

A judge returns to his old stomping ground to do some good, but he has secrets of his own.

A local reporter is on the scent! The bad guy owns a boxing gym! The local vicar is in it frock deep! Yup. There's nothing really new here but it's moderately captivating in an unchallenging way.

The photography is good, the manipulative music is annoying, but it's all nicely tied up in the end!

Not great, but not bad.

This new series of 5 programmes is endlessly surprising. Just when you thought you had it figured out, another deft piece of writing intervenes and you have to take stock. Superficially this is a cartoon strip of 'A day in the life...... of a socially deprived part of Liverpool'. At this level it is reminiscent of the trivial American TV series 'The Father Dowling Mysteries', but Justice is much more remarkable than that. There is an undercurrent of originality and nuance, exquisite observation and lightness of touch that made me watch all 5 programmes on the trot and to want to know who had written/directed it. A relief from the unrelenting brutality and extremes of Waking the Dead or CSI, this is a true realism with heart.

The only thing going for this short series is that I didn't have to invest a lot of time in it. After enjoying Jody Comer's excellent work in Killing Eve I was looking forward to Justice. Unfortunately the story was cliche and uninteresting. What made it exponentially worse was the sound editing. Background music is called "background" for a reason. Likewise for ambient noise such as traffic and pub sounds. On a scale of 1 to 10, if people are speaking at level 4, the music and other sounds should not be at level 9. This just makes the dialog unintelligible, and if you can't hear the story there is no point in telling it.

Add to that an unsatisfactory and confusing ending that was squeezed into the last 10 minutes of the last episode and you just end up with a colossal failure.

This might be an ok show, it might be a good show, it might even be an excellent show, but I can't tell because I can't hear a lot of what's being said. Either the background noise is too loud or the voices are so low in the mix I can only pick out half of the dialog. I love British mysteries and courtroom shows but this is a big disappointment.