5 out of 5

Created by: Sally Wainwright, Diane Taylor, Suranne Jones (idea), Sally Lindsay (idea)

covers through season 3

Nowadays, saying you like police procedurals can mean anything.  You can lean toward the sassy crass of CSI, one and done style like Law & Order, something ‘gritty’ like Southland, or, y’know, dad-flavored like NCIS.  The Brits definitely, certainly have their own range of flavors of police shows as well, but a larger sampling of them seem to be a bit more dry than our batch, and sometimes – and something I prefer – much more actually procedural.  All the same, ‘Scott & Bailey’ looks like a chick show.  The very first episode opens with one of our leads, Rachel (Suranne Jones) getting dumped, and the lead credits feature only females – Rachel, Janet (Lesley Sharp), and head of our featured Major Incident Team Gill (Amelia Bullmore).  Soon, Rachel is telling Janet the what’s what, and we’re ready to don our sexist caps and file this away with Downton Abbey or something.  But.  Rachel tells her tale with an interesting blend of dismissiveness and emotion, while Janet listens and responds with the type of terse directness we all wish we could accept / hear from our friends.  These don’t feel like stereotypes because the conversation – and character types – aren’t explicitly suited to work for a television show.  Meanwhile, actual police work is happening.  Lead writer Sally Wainwright paired with a former inspector, Diane Taylor, to shape the structure of the show and the reality is apparent down to the last detail: the close-quarters office, the humdrum computer work that must be done to connect the dots, the painfully patient interviews.  And that sense of reality extends to all of our characters as well, so instead of the process dragging, each episode just brims with life, with each aspect – the police work, the personal details – feeding off of one another such that you really can’t get enough of either, and it never feels like a sidestep or padding when the show pushes us toward a non-Rachel or Janet character.  Yes, the initial intention was to create a female-centric show, but by steering the dramatics toward something very, very grounded – blending that with two dynamic leads and an overall strong cast and professional production – we wound up with a cop show that kicks most cop shows in the pants without having to fall back on mysterious killers or will she / won’t she type cliffhangers.