3 out of 5

Creator: Declan Croghan

A slow start, a compelling middle, a typical end.  Life of Crime has a nice concept for its 3 episode structure, following the ramifications of a string of rape / murders seemingly perpetrated by the same party over the course of three decades, with the episodes separated by time – 80s, 90s, 00s.  The effects swirl around Hayley Atwell’s police-woman Denise Woods, as her attempts to track down the guilty take quite a toll on her personal life and career.

The main issue here is with tone.  ‘Life of Crime’ can’t figure out how procedural it wants to go, or how family drama it wants to go, or how gender-struggle it wants to go.  So it shoehorns pieces of these templates into nooks and crannies, admittedly choosing a focus for each episode but making the whole experience somewhat imbalanced.  Atwell’s hushed but powerful performance adds notes of consistency, though the touch of gray hair in the 00s period isn’t quite enough to age her believably – production design is somewhat lacking on the show.  Besides some music choices, the decades are pretty much interchangable, and the leads that appear across the years – Atwell’s sometimes estranged hubbie and fellow copper Richard Coyle, ‘he looks guilty’ Julian Lewis Jones – mature miraculously well.  Some might even say they don’t appear to have changed at all.

This aside, once it places its footing with its first episode, the series finds an incredibly strong peak in the middle, Denise’s career having taken off, and past guilt casting a shadow on her marriage and career while she tries to steadfastly and stoically pursue a line of justice.  It’s a position that’s earned by the stumbling, slow start, where we see Denise at the beginning of her years on the force, and sets us up for wondering what’s next much better than the somewhat pat conclusion to episode one did.  Episode three picks this element up surprisingly strongly, jumping forward to its final decade to show how Woods has had to take the long road to get to a trusted position, and some well-done understated family moments drive home the sadness in her life.  But, oh, we love happy endings, so it turns back into a procedural all of a sudden for solving the lingering crime…

The results aren’t overly sappy per se, and remain realistic, but it just seems like LoC didn’t have the space to really run us through the dredges of Woods’ career, so it does its best to cover it all in as minimal time as possible.  Atwell makes for an interesting lead character and it’d be great to see her in a similar, ongoing role.  Life of Crime ends up just being a taste of something good, never really uninteresting but only rising to the occasion at key moments.