Seasons one and two of Blue Lights told the story of rookie Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officers learning the law-enforcement ropes on the mean streets of Belfast – streets portrayed as rived with sectarian divisions decades after the end of the Troubles.
However, series three (BBC One, Monday, 9pm) takes the risky and not entirely successful decision to look South. It does so by pitting Detective Grace Ellis (Siân Brooke) and her fellow officers against a Dublin cocaine gang, which may or may not be inspired by a real-life Irish criminal cartel.
In other words, having so atmospherically evoked modern Belfast, Blue Lights has come down with a bad case of Love/Hate syndrome. Or Kin-itis, if you prefer a more modern reference. Either way, an always slightly soapy affair has now decided it fancies a slice of the Dublin gangland noir pie. It’s certainly a departure and you have to admire Blue Light’s willingness to try something different. The downside is that it places the show in a territory where it is visibly less assured.
Blue Lights is written by the Belfast-based duo Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson. Their grasp of the intricacies of the Northern city has always been solid and that remains so. They once again bring the city to life as a labyrinth, bubbling with distrust towards both the police and those on each side of the republican-loyalist divide.
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Sadly, their feeling for Dublin gangsters is far more comic book, as becomes gradually evident when a figure from Grace’s previous life returns to haunt her. A former social worker, she receives a sharp reminder of the lives she did and didn’t save when a routine stop-and-search of a local drug courier (Jack McBride-Marshall) takes a turn for the unexpected.
In the company of the drug peddler is 17-year-old Lindsay (Aoife Hughes), a client of Grace during her social work days. Left to her own devices, the teenager feels that her former mentor let her down just so she could become a “peeler”. But Lindsay and her partner are also people of interest to a plainclothes intelligence unit led by Paul Collins (Bad Sisters’ Michael Smiley). They are trying to neutralise a drugs gang from Dublin that has furnished local dealers with a high-tech app that makes arranging a house delivery of cocaine as easy as ordering a curry on Deliveroo.
The outsiders have infiltrated Belfast and taken over from the republican and loyalist pushers – a plot line which feels hokey and implausible. It doesn’t help that the cartel representative in Belfast (Charlie Maher) seems to be doing a watered-down impersonation of Tom Vaughan-Lawlor’s Nidge from Love/Hate.
It’s quite a switch-up: having once made a virtue of its Belfast setting, now Blue Lights seems ready to move on. Series three still has lots of what viewers love about the show – the banter between Grace and her colleagues is agreeably wry and irreverent. In that respect it remains a superior thriller – but one surely now in danger of becoming just another generic UK cop caper, with a side-serving of Dublin gangland sensationalism.
