Review: 'Blue Lights' isn't the Belfast equivalent of 'The Wire.' And that's okay.

When The Wire was about to debut in the summer of 2002, I interviewed its co-creator, David Simon, whose TV career began with him writing for Homicide: Life on the Street, the acclaimed NBC drama based on Simon's non-fiction book. The Wire, you might recall, begins relatively simply as the story of a Baltimore police detective building a case against the head of a local drug crew. I had only seen those early episodes, and as a result, Simon and I spent much of the interview talking past each other. My questions were about where Simon's new project fit into the police drama tradition that Homicide had been such a sterling example of, while Simon kept trying to explain that the show was about institutions that after a while exist only to perpetuate themselves. I assumed we were discussing another cop show; Simon was striving to make something much bigger than that. And, as we all eventually realized, he succeeded. 

So when I heard that the BBC series Blue Lights had been described as an attempt to set something like The Wire in Northern Ireland, I was intrigued. When I sat down to binge the full series, whose third season began streaming last week on BritBox, it turned out to in fact be a cop show. It addresses various socio-political issues in and around Belfast. But its primary interest and its primary strength are depicting the lives and work of the uniformed response officers — or, as they're referred to (with affection among their own ranks, with derision by the civilian population) "peelers"(*). 

(*) The nickname comes from Sir Robert Peel, who's generally credited with inventing modern policing in the UK. (He's also why English cops are called "bobbies.") 

I say this upfront only to set proper expectations. Blue Lights is very much a cop show. It just happens to be an excellent one.