'Criminal Record's Double Episode Premiere Doubles The Calls For Help

Dirty cops, a murder mystery, a dogged detective willing to buck the system: these are things we’ve seen many times before. What truly sets Apple TV+’s new series Criminal Record apart is the cast. I mean, how can you not want to watch a show starring Peter Capaldi (Doctor Who) as a veteran detective with a dark side and Cush Jumbo (The Beast Must Die) as the plucky detective willing to risk her career to bring him down?

In the two-episode premiere, we are immediately thrown into this London-based story. Capaldi’s grizzled (bitter?) DCI Daniel Hegarty is working off-duty on a security detail. He’s driving a limo for a tipsy couple who want to hear all his war stories. “It’s a young man’s game. Doesn’t matter how fit you are, criminals are always 18,” he tells them as he drives by a young woman going to a pay phone (they still exist!) and making a desperate phone call to emergency services. “I need police,” she says.

Jumbo’s Detective Sergeant June Lenker is recently promoted and juggling not just her career but also a mom who is constantly calling her to look up the license plate numbers (the most recent suspicious van was a grocery delivery service), a son on the brink of adolescence (“Mom, a time and a place,” he says when June tries to hug him.) and a husband who thinks she might be seeking out trouble. June is assigned to investigate the emergency domestic violence call that came in the previous night. The caller, who refuses to give her name, says her boyfriend is trying to kill her and then makes a shocking statement. “He had a girlfriend a long time ago... he stabbed her many, many times with the same knife he put in me, and now she’s dead... there’s a man in prison doing 24 years for killing her.” The caller hangs up before she reveals her name or any more information.