Line of Duty (2012– )

DS Steve Arnott is transferred to the police anti-corruption unit after the death of a man in a mistaken shooting during a counter-terrorist operation by another cop.

Creator:

Jed Mercurio

Stars:

Martin Compston, Lennie James, Vicky McClure

5 nominations.

Cast

Series cast summary:
Martin Compston	...	DS Steve Arnott (5 episodes, 2012)
Lennie James	...	DCI Tony Gates (5 episodes, 2012)
Vicky McClure	...	DC Kate Fleming (5 episodes, 2012)
Craig Parkinson	...	Cottan (5 episodes, 2012)
Adrian Dunbar	...	Superintendent Ted Hastings (5 episodes, 2012)
Neil Morrissey	...	DC Nigel Morton (5 episodes, 2012)
Fiona Boylan	...	WPC Karen Larkin (5 episodes, 2012)
Kate Ashfield	...	Jools Gates (5 episodes, 2012)
Claire Keelan	...	DS Leah Janson (5 episodes, 2012)
Saffron Davies	...	Chloe Tate (5 episodes, 2012)
Jordyn-Eve Davis Greene	...	Natalie Tate (5 episodes, 2012)
Paul Higgins	...	CS Derek Hilton (5 episodes, 2012)
Gregory Piper	...	Ryan Pilkington (4 episodes, 2012)
Tomi May	...	Miroslav (4 episodes, 2012)
Neet Mohan	...	PC Simon Bannerjee (4 episodes, 2012)
Faraz Ayub	...	DC Deepak Kapoor (3 episodes, 2012)
Gina McKee	...	Jackie Laverty (3 episodes, 2012)
Alison Lintott	...	Rita Bennett (3 episodes, 2012)
Brian Miller	...	Alf Butterfield (3 episodes, 2012)
Nigel Boyle	...	DI Ian Buckells (3 episodes, 2012)
Darren Morfitt	...	Sergeant Colin Brackley (3 episodes, 2012)
Owen Teale	...	Chief Inspector Osborne (3 episodes, 2012)
Lauren O'Rourke	...	Keely (3 episodes, 2012)

Storyline

Following one multi-stranded investigation over five hours, Line Of Duty sees Detective Sergeant Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) transferred to AC-12, a fictional anti-corruption unit, after a mistaken shooting during a counter-terrorist operation. Alongside Detective Constable Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), they are assigned to lead an investigation into the alleged corruption by a popular and successful officer, Detective Chief Inspector Tony Gates (Lennie James). While Gates cleverly manipulates his unit's figures, DS Arnott questions whether Gates's being made a scapegoat for a culture of institutionalised spin, or is guilty of darker corruption?

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Genres:

Crime | Drama | Thriller

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Details

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Release Date:

2012 (UK)

Filming Locations:

Birmingham, West Midlands, England, UK

Company Credits

Production Co:

BBC Drama Productions, World Productions

Technical Specs

Runtime:

300 min

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.78 : 1

Did You Know?

Connections

Featured in The Wright Stuff: Episode #17.120 (2012)

User Reviews

Straight down the line

Last year the BBC brought us the superb, slightly strange police thriller 'The Shadow Line'; this year, the rather more conventional 'The Line of Duty' has aired. Aspects of this programme are quite good, although it never feels exactly fresh. Anti-corruption units, and undercover agents, have been on our screen before ('Between the Lines'

• there's clearly something magnetic about that word 'line' and 'The

Ghost Squad') - and some of the conspiracy elements seem both far fetched and perfunctory. Perhaps the greatest problem is that Lennie James' protagonist is a hard man to connect with: an almost-clean copper brought down by a bad friend, he remains a hard man to like, and while he appears to be driven by his own private sense of ethics, this moral code seems completely self-centred - he's torn when he fails to live up to his own expectations of himself, but it's hard to see why we should care. And the portrait of feral kids on the local housing estate seems both lazy, and again relatively loosely connected to the more serious crime in the background - if you're looking for the forensic detail of 'The Wire', you won't find it here. None of this actually makes for a bad series - it does all the standard things you expect a show of this sort to do reasonably well, but it doesn't add much you won't have seen before.