4 out of 5

Created by: Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent

Life is messy. It doesn’t always – or, if ever, rarely – divide into black and white decisions. Our brains are not wired to create a linear path in our lives, and maybe what we decide on a certain matter today will differ tomorrow. UK police drama Better covers an idea we’ve seen before – a corrupt cop, just trying to get their head above water – but by understanding and allowing for that messiness, it emerges as one of the strongest shows of its type, finding a way to tell a satisfying start-to-finish story without necessarily drawing a clean, tightly-narrated circle around each of its pieces.

DI Lou Slack (Leila Farzad) seems to be doing well. A happy marriage, a son she loves, and she’s good at her job – known for getting the tough collars. A quiet evening is interrupted by a call which she deals with privately, driving out to what looks like a crime scene, and, being careful not to leave any of her own traces behind, taking care of setting the scene up a bit. …Because she’s also working for local drug lord / business man Col (Andrew Buchan), and has done for years, the two feeding information back and forth to each of their benefits, and she’s able to maintain a flexible wall of morality, thanks to the good she does as a result.

She’s out on another evening, on related matters, when the lingering fever that her son (Zak Ford-Williams) has had turns out to be a severe meningitis infection, leaving the boy hospitalized, on the brink of death. A bedside please from Lou has her promising to turn her life around, if only her son can survive.

He does. She tries. It’s not that easy.

Again, this is not a new concept, but Better’s writers (Jonathan Brackley and Sam Vincent) and main director (Jonathan Brough) add much meat to the idea by both staying focused – there are subplots, but the story is the story, of Lou’s attempted turnaround – and, in a way, unfocused, not allowing everyone’s motivations and actions to be straight lines. Lou wavers. She has the conviction of lingering guilt, which is smartly shown through cutaway images that flow through her thoughts (her son; the various maladies she’s witnessed as a result of Col), but also recognizes that there’s likely no clean way out of this, with any workaround creating some additional damage, whether to her family or others. And the overall question hanging over her head: shouldn’t she have to pay for her actions (or inactions) as well?

She connects with an older cop associate of her father’s (Anton Lesser) for some guidance, and the two ping-pong back and forth on Right and Wrong, and what – if anything – can be done. And step by step, episode by episode, Lou pulls away from Col, with some killer cliffhangers as she puts her foot down on a particular task, and / or Col realizes his crooked cop may be turning on him…

The initial plot pieces to get this machinery moving can be a bit clunky, though. And the story benefits from its simplicity; whenever it tries to get tricksy with plotting – whichever double-crosses Lou or Col figure on – it can feel a bit silly, with people making decisions that feel below a certain standard of competence. But these are almost external to the core story: the weight of our decisions upon others, and ourselves; as such, Better is able to move the silliness aside quickly or easily enough, and sink us into the knife twisting of Lou’s struggles. The script is, otherwise, excellent, with some brilliantly tight moments that, again, allow for the wiggly way our brains work, saying things without always knowing the words, and some key scenes later on in the series that are just some of the most impactful sequences of these sorts, speaking to the complexities of morality without stretching for some cheap point. The actors mostly carry this, though Farzad’s reactions when she has to mask her feelings can feel a bit off, and Samuel Edward-Cook, playing her husband, takes a few episodes to warm up. However, when Farzad is allowed to be straight with how she’s feeling, you can see all the conflict behind her eyes, and Edward-Cook is similarly able to turn it out around once both his character and Farzad’s are on the same page.

Overall, all of these flaws are positively overwhelmed by the writers handling of the material, and allowing for just the right amount of runtime to be able to deal with it seriously, and provide us with a conclusion that’s debatably realistic, but keeps with the moral greys the series contemplates.