AppleTV+’s new crime drama compellingly juggles issues of race, internal politics, and family dynamics.

Criminal Record drips with a sinister sense of foreboding in the first episode’s cold opening. Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi), a high-ranking cop moonlighting as a car service driver, guides an age-mismatched couple to their destination, trying to play nice with them. The man of the lovers obnoxiously probes Hegarty for gruesome tales. In reply, the detective briefly indulges them before trailing off. To bring things to a close, he declares he’s seen far worse than what he’s described, and more often besides.

Nothing more happens. We never see the couple again. Presumably, Hegarty got them where they were going without anything further of interest occurring. Still, the scene bristles and pulses with danger. One can easily imagine Hegarty arresting them both. Or, worse, revealing his corruption and killing them both. Criminal Record isn’t that kind of show, as it turns out. However, the series smartly sets its tone in those early moments. No matter what it shows the audience after that, it’s impossible to shake the sense that this aging cop, played by Capaldi as somehow both spry and fragile, could be a ticking time bomb.

That sense of dread underlines everything that happens after. June Lenker (Cush Jumbo), a more junior officer, gets assigned to follow up on a strange emergency call. The unidentified woman, seeking protection from an abusive lover, hints that her aggressor may be the murderer in a long-closed case. With Hegarty leading the investigation zeroed in on the murder victim’s boyfriend, Errol Mathis (Tom Moutchi). He ultimately confessed despite initially denying his involvement and providing an alibi. Based on the calls, Lenker argues that reopening the case has value. Hegarty pushes back against her in ways both subtle and brutal. When a young boy ends up shot in an apparent accident, the two are pulled into the case. As they work together both continue to try and best one another on the Mathis case.

Lenker is the biracial child of a white woman with a well-earned distaste for police and a deceased Black man who spent much of his life harassed for his skin color and “haircut”. She clearly joined the force to be the good apple in the bushel of bad. Her romantic partner, Leo (Stephen Campbell Moore), a white therapist, complicates her life further. He’s progressive enough to know her son Jacob’s (Jordan A. Nash) possession with intent to sell was a set-up job. Unfortunately, his unconscious biases still lead him to accuse Jacob’s friends, also teen boys of color, of being responsible. This is especially galling when it’s obvious to even the most casual of observers what truly happened. These cops punished Lenker for stepping out of the Thin Blue Line by planting evidence on her only child.

To Criminal Records’ credit, they largely resist giving Jumbo big speeches on such matters. Instead, the actor lets us in slowly as she unravels, forced to once again face the reality that the system is broken and sick, and she hasn’t fixed a thing. The community’s reaction to her is another slap, repeatedly rejecting her as more cop than woman of color.

In the nature of these things, as the acrimony between Hegarty and Lenker rises, so does their understanding of one another. Capaldi quietly conveys what the years of police work have wrought upon him, moving like a shade from crime scene to crime scene. Like Lenker, Hegarty has learned the cost of police work on one’s family. While his trials are markedly different, he too has made well-meaning decision after decision only to see he and his harmed anyway.

In the end, the series takes it both too hard and too easy on Hegarty. It largely ignores systemic pressures and politics that force his poor decisions—as well as a system that forced a single father drowning in grief back onto the job far too soon. However, it also singles other players for far harsher punishments while giving him a gentler, if ambiguous, departure.

Lenker’s neither betwixt nor between fate feels more satisfying despite similar ambiguity. It carries a sense of “All of this has happened before, and it will happen again.” Lenker’s present mirrors Hegarty’s past, suggesting that her future may well crash against the same kind of rocks his present has.

While not nearly as bleak or stylish, Criminal Record recalls 2022’s We Own This City in its sense of inevitable corruption and systemic failure. No one is as overblown monstrous as Jon Bernthal’s top cop in that series, but both carry the depressing air that no one can escape the touch of law enforcement without paying a price too high to be reconciled.