The Wire, but make it Keeley Hawes

Watching Line of Duty from the sickbed

I’ve recently realised that Line of Duty (BBC, 2012–21) was intended to be a UK version of The Wire (HBO, 2002–08). I’m not going list all the ways it falls short; it feels pointlessly mean to type the sentence ‘Line of Duty is nowhere near as good as The Wire’, like crossing the road to tell a five-a-side team that they’re no Argentina. Very little on TV is as good as The Wire, and it’s good to have goals.

I only bring up the comparison because the homage became clear to me during a rapid sickbed rewatch of Line of Duty. (There’s something slightly hallucinatory about binge-watching: time loses all meaning, everything feels a bit alien and you begin to perceive things in a different way, man.) If you watch several seasons of Line of Duty back to back over the course of three or four days, it seems obvious that The Wire was what writer Jed Mercurio was shooting for.

The timeline makes sense. Mercurio’s work on the first season of Line of Duty coincided precisely with the period when a small but influential group of critics, taste-makers and New York Times readers decided that The Wire was the best TV show ever made. If you were around at the time you’ll probably remember the sheer fervency of the commentary. It wouldn’t be surprising if a hot young British screenwriter developing a crime series decided to try something similar.

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Like The Wire, Line of Duty combines primary plotlines with a portrait of a society in trouble, and explicitly draws out the connections between the two. It focuses on what happens when corruption, criminality and multi-generational poverty intersect, forcing the viewer to consider the impacts of systemic dysfunction. (This is also what Dickens did; this genre was called the ‘condition-of-England’ novel, which seems very apt.)

Both The Wire and Line of Duty argue that there’s a close interrelationship between the greedy, the deprived and the depraved. Disadvantaged, unparented children and vulnerable adults become enmeshed in criminal activity and actively participate in the further destruction of their own communities, while corrupt officialdom laughs and lines its pockets. The moment the comparison between the two series first struck me was during a drug-dealing scene set on Line of Duty’s ‘Bog’ estate. Kids on bikes make the final hand-offs to addicts; older criminals stand back and supervise; the disaffected, cynical bobbies deliberately stay away; parents are too doped up to care. It was a direct lift from many similar scenes in the early seasons of The Wire, even down to the way the shots were laid out.

The Wire, famously, used its five seasons to successively focus on different structural aspects of life and money in Baltimore: the illegal drug trade, the port, the city government, schools, and news journalism. Each season builds upon the thesis that many American communities have been fundamentally and perhaps irreparably broken by multi-generational poverty and injustice. And although the seasonal themes are not as distinct, Line of Duty tries to do the same for the UK, or at least for England, taking big bites out of various themes (money laundering, protection failures in social services, the sexual exploitation and abuse of women and children) against a running backdrop of poverty, organised crime, police corruption, and the miserable fucking uselessness of senior office-holders in major agencies. This last theme turned out to be awfully prescient, given some British news stories over the last few years.

And there are other similarities. Like The Wire, lead characters from one season of Line of Duty reappear in more minor roles in other seasons, building texture and continuity. Characters move in and out of focus but – like real humans – they don’t necessarily disappear when their plotline has been resolved. (Again this recalls Victorian mega-novels such as Middlemarch, in which the focus is constantly shifting between a host of major and minor characters.) And while Line of Duty does not have such a specific sense of place as The Wire, over the six seasons we come to feel that we know a lot about the unnamed city in which it is set (popularly supposed to be Birmingham).

So while – entirely obviously – it’s not as good as The Wire, Line of Duty is much better than it needs to be, which is why (like Happy Valley) it was so wildly successful. It’s patently silly in parts – major characters are forever being beaten/punched/burned/stabbed/shot and bouncing back up again with a small facial bruise – and the dialogue is often EastEnders-level dreadful. But the fundamental premise (widespread police corruption) is unusual and topical, the plotting is compulsive as hell, and some of the performances are surprisingly great. I have a soft spot for Neil Morrissey’s half-bent cop Nigel Morton, frightening and tragic in equal measures; it’s quite a revelation if you last saw him goofing around asexually in Men Behaving Badly.

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Lennie James is compelling as the guest star in Season 1, and Daniel Mays and Thandiwe Newton are both great in later series. Mostly, though, I watch Line of Duty for the sheer Keeley Hawes of it. She’s the major character in Season 3 and reappears in Season 4, and she is the reason I stuck ‘Line of Duty’ in the Firestick search bar when I was feeling under the weather. There’s something about Hawes that brings out the fangirl in me. For want of a better way of putting it, she is a proper grown-up woman, and – although Cate Blanchett and Jessica Chastain also exist – there still aren’t enough of these on the screen for my liking. She is an unapologetic adult, never cute, or coy, or fragile or ingratiating. So many actors, male and female, project neediness; it’s probably an inevitable consequence of a career that tends to attract people who are desperate for approval. But with Hawes, unusually, you feel that she wants nothing from you at all. You have permission to simply watch. And she is extremely watchable.

Her role in Line of Duty as police officer Lindsay Denton – who may or may not have taken a bung to lead a police convoy into a deadly ambush – is trademark Hawes, ambiguous and unknowable. Her soft, quiet, well-spoken voice, her doll-like face and teensy wee nosey, and her air of placid self-possession work brilliantly for these borderline-psychopath roles (see also her brilliant turn as the nightmarish, broken mother in Channel 4’s astonishing It’s A Sin).

There’s a moment in Line of Duty when Hawes (as Denton) is facing another sleepless night because of a feckless noisy neighbour. You’re not surprised when she pulls on a dressing gown and calmly walks to her neighbour’s door to have a word, but you are surprised when she bashes her neighbour unconscious with an empty wine bottle and beats her lifeless head against the doorstep. If it had been Sarah Lancashire, you wouldn’t have been so shocked.

What struck me, watching Line of Duty this time around, was that Hawes had put on weight for the role. (I assume it was for the role. If it turns out she had some medical condition or dreadful life crisis and I’ve written several paragraphs about her weight, I’m going to feel awful.) There’s a widespread convention now that viewers and critics must not note the weight of female actors, but – while I understand the reasons – I think this is hooey. It is the job of female character actors to represent the female experience, and few things unite women more effectively than our collective obsession with weight. Among nearly all the women I know it takes up a huge amount of brain space. Of course this shouldn’t be true, but meanwhile in the real world it is in fact true.

Most of us – women included, women most of all – make judgements about women who are carrying a couple of extra stones. We see them (us) as essentially defeated, sub-par, low-energy. We imagine them stuffing Dairy Milk at 10pm in a desperate act of self-comfort, just like we do. We imagine them to be needy and weak. Their chubbiness must be a sign that they don’t have what it takes to be an alpha, because that’s what we think about ourselves.

When the audience first meets Denton, Hawes’s character in Line of Duty, we have to believe that she is dowdy, overlooked, defenceless and defeated. These words are not commonly associated with Keeley Hawes. And I reckon she worked out that the best, most intuitive way to do this was to put on a specific amount of weight: not loads, not fat-suit kind of weight, but just enough to make her a bit ungainly and lumpy, enough so that she takes up more space than is popularly considered to be debonair. She didn’t insist on a deliberately-bad haircut or awful make-up, because in real life overweight women — which is most of us, including me — are more likely to do our best with these things in an effort to distract from our thighs. Instead she put on enough fat so that she had rugby-player shoulders and visible lumps around her bra straps under her drapey long tops. When I realised what she’d done, I wanted to stand up and applaud. It seems clear that Hawes regards her beauty, like the rest of her, as being entirely her own business. It is hers, not ours, and she will do with it as she wishes.

Hawes’s performance stands in for the ways Line of Duty is actually better than The Wire; or, if not better (I suppose I’m not that much of a contrarian), in some ways more comfortable. There’s no misogyny in Line of Duty (I have serious doubts about some of the strip club scenes in The Wire); the women characters receive absolutely equal treatment throughout. The guest star roles are subtle and thoughtful; you feel that these people could really exist. The portrayal of relationships between people of different ethnic backgrounds is nuanced and largely positive, reflecting the significant differences between Birmingham and Baltimore. And while the whole thing might have sprung from Mercurio’s desire to emulate The Best TV Show Of All Time, there’s a restful Britishness about the whole thing, a bathetic fug of bacon butties and teapots and nice pubs alongside the blood and guts and desperation. And if that isn’t the condition of England, I don’t know what is.

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For more women on the beat (and references to The Wire), try Rowan’s piece on Happy Valley.