The Best Cop Show You've Never Seen

The Wire is the best television series of all time. There is only one The Wire, there will never be another The Wire, and any attempt to draw comparisons to The Wire is, frankly, a little insulting. Blue Lights is not The Wire. That said, Blue Lights (streaming on BritBox) shares some thematic and even structural similarities. It follows an Irish police force in Belfast that works as hard to fix a broken system as it does to clean up the streets. In both respects, the effort is mostly frustrating and frequently futile. These peelers (Irish for coppers) spend their days risking their lives and grinding through relentless drudge work in the hope of making the smallest difference at the margins.

It is not The Wire, although over the course of three seasons it does something similar to the David Simon series, returning again and again to the same drug operation run by the same people and entities because when one head is cut off, another inevitably takes its place. It focuses largely on beat cops, or response, but it is not Southland. There is strong character drama and occasional levity, but it is not The Rookie, either.

I am not entirely sure what to compare it to, except maybe The Pitt. It is an exceptionally well-executed, well-written, and well-performed streaming series that feels like prestige television while still borrowing elements from the classic case-of-the-week structure. The characters are likable, the stakes are high, and everything remains grounded and believable. There are small victories and emotionally devastating turns, but it never feels oppressive. Creators Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson find exactly the right balance between serious crime drama and an entertaining police procedural. It’s like that happy place between HBO and TNT.

The impressive third season wrapped today, and I have spent the past week binging all three six-episode seasons in their entirety. Somehow, the series improves with each successive season.

Blue Lights is an ensemble led, nominally, by Siân Brooke (Trying), one of the few faces likely to be familiar to American audiences. She plays Constable Grace Ellis, a social worker turned cop who enters the force with what initially seems like a naively optimistic belief that she can change the profession using the ideals of her former career. As the series unfolds, however, it becomes clear that things were just as broken in her previous job as they are now, and joining the police has not improved matters so much as it has placed her in greater danger.

The rest of the cast is made up of probationers and veterans who serve as the eyes and ears of the force. They are the grunts, the boots on the ground responding to domestic violence calls, overdoses, and bar fights. Inevitably, they also get pulled into larger investigations involving the Ginley family drug operation, Republican operatives (Republican in the Irish sense, not the American), and a deeply messy family working both sides of the conflict. Blue Lights is obviously not Scorsese, but there are shades of The Departed here, along with echoes of the Whitey Bulger story.

This is not an especially violent or hyper-intense series driven by murder mysteries. It is built around its characters, and those characters are my favorite kind. They are fundamentally good people trying to do good things. Still, they are forced to navigate a broken system, competing agendas within the police force, relationship tensions, Internal Affairs scrutiny, and, at times, profound grief.

Blue Lights is far better than most cop shows. It is still not The Wire. But it is not an exaggeration to say it resembles The Pitt in its strengths. It is engrossing, sharply observed, and clearly informed by real conversations with Irish police. The writers have done their homework, not only on the peelers themselves but on Belfast as a place, grounding the series in its history and social context. It is captivating, deeply impressive, and easily one of my favorite series of the year.

All three seasons of ‘Blue Lights’ is currently streaming on Britbox.