Bloodlands

Just watched the first episode and really impressed with the quality. Interesting story of a modern crime while demonstrating the difficulty of policing in NI over 20 years after the GFA.

A solid police show with a nice steady stream of twists and reveals, the second episode just dropped on ROKU and it keeps up the intrigue begun in the first. Not so complex that you need a scorecard to follow it, yet it never seems to drag or leave you looking for the FF button. I admit to being a sucker for Irish police shows and this one hasn't disappointed. Edit: I have to withdraw my enthusiasm for this series since the writers decided to make so many characters totally unlikable or dead. They had a great start but I think they dropped the ball big time. For me a show needs to have someone I can root for and they've left me with no one.

Wow... judging by a large share of unfavorable comments submitted here, "Bloodlands" isn't very popular among the viewers. Then again, most of the reviews were written after barely one (out of four) episode, and restrict to just one or two sentences stating the series is boring and awful. How reliable are those opinions? Personally, I found "Bloodlands" a compelling and well-scripted thriller mini-series, albeit with a number of shortcomings.

The series is heavy on politics, but what else do you expect from a murder-and-kidnapping story set in Northern Ireland, and jumping back and forth between April 1998 (the period leading up to the Good Friday peace agreement) and present day, where the truce between Catholics and Protestants is still very vulnerable. The kidnapping of former IRA-militant (and thoroughly unpleasant) Pat Keenan also reopens the unresolved case of the so-called Goliath murders. Those murders were committed between February and April 1998, presumably by a member of the police force, but had to be covered up in favor of the approaching peace agreement. DCI Tom Brannick lost his wife to the Goliath killer, and is now confronted again with the cold case.

There's not a whole lot of action in "Bloodlands", but the script is intelligent and full of unforeseeable twists. Especially halfway and during the finale, there are some perplexing twists. James Nesbitt in the lead role is somewhat a mixed bag. I like him as an actor, especially since his powerful role in "The Missing", and he fits the character, but his performance is wickedly uneven. All of his facial expressions, whether its rage or frustration or sadness, make it look as if he's struggling with stomach aches. Strong supportive cast, though, including Lorcan Cranitch, Charlene McKenna and Peter Ballance. And, what I definitely enjoyed most about "Bloodlands" was the Irishness; - duh! The history lessons, the trivia, the accents, and even one sequence in genuine Irish language.

This is a strange program -- all the ingredients seem to be there for a good show but it doesn't get there. Part of the problem is that the plotting is twisted and hard to follow, part of the problem is that the characters aren't very well developed, and part of the problem is that the writing is overly cliched -- way too many "'let's go get 'em" and "there he is!" and "this is an important case and we must do our best" kind of lines.

But the other issue is the strangest -- for whatever reason, the camera spends far too much time focused on James Nesbitt's face, as though the storyline depended entirely on his expressions. He's a good actor but do we have to watch him so closely, follow his every facial tic, watch his eyes watch other people? It's almost as if someone said, "hey, let's do a show about James Nesbitt's face and, sure, we can add some plot and some characters if you want." Weird.

Jed Mercurio was a producer on 'Bloodlands', and the influence of 'Line of Duty' shows: check corrupt police, complicated plot, untrustworthy protagonists, elongated interview scences, and in this case, more than one character with a Northern Irish accent. In fact, the entire story is set in Northern Island, where a contemporary murder sounds echoes of the Troubles. Like 'Line of Duty', it's also very watchable, although the plotting isn't quite as clever. It's a bold move not to give the viewer a central figure to follow throughout, but also a disengaging one. But it's well put together, and supremely watchable, though a little lacking in emotional heft.