Last month, PBS debuted a British police drama called Patience, about an autistic police records clerk helping a detective with cases because of the way she looks at evidence and other aspects of a crime differently. This month, in the new BritBox drama Code Of Silence, a civilian with different special skills is being asked to help the police.
Opening Shot: A woman is breathing heavily in a bit of a panic. She’s in the back of a police car, and she has blood all over her. There’s a lot going on, but to Alison Brooks (Rose Ayling-Ellis), the world around her is mostly muffled or silent.
The Gist: Three weeks earlier, we see Alison biking to her job as a cafeteria worker at the local police station. She works there and at a local bar to make ends meet; she lives with her mother Julie (Fifi Garfield), whom she moved in with after a breakup. Both Alison and her mom are deaf; both sign but Alison can read lips.
At the police station, she gets word that DS Ashleigh Francis (Charlotte Ritchie) wants to see her; apparently Alison added her lip reading skills to a database when she got the job, and DS Francis wants her help, as the other lip readers in the department are on other cases. DS Francis and her boss, DI James Marsh (Andrew Buchan) are going after a group of high-end thieves who have resorted to violence in the past. They’re going to rendezvous in a local park, and while offers are out there with hidden cameras, DS Francis and DI Marsh want to know what they’re saying.
For Alison’s protection, DS Francis only identifies the gang — Helen Redman (Beth Goddard), Braden Moore (Joe Absolom) and Joseph Holhurst (Andrew Scarborough) — by code names. The fourth person they meet with is unknown. But Alison is able to read him saying that his name was Liam, leading to the name Liam Barlow (Kieron Moore). He’s been hired for particular skills, probably in the hacking department, and is being put up in a flat around the corner from a local pub.
Alison is thrilled by her participation in this case, especially when she and DS Francis go into a restaurant so Alison can get close enough to read the gang members’ lips. But the more Francis and Marsh tell Alison to leave the investigating to the police, the more Alison wants to get involved. When she loses her part-time gig at the bar due to a boss who can’t seem to tolerate her missing customer orders and getting things wrong, she gets a job at the pub near where Liam is staying, and they get to know each other for a little bit when he comes in for a beer.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The premise of Code Of Silence, created by Catherine Moulton, parallels the premise of the PBS series Patience.
Our Take: Code Of Silence is mostly enjoyable, due to a sparkling performance by Rose Ayling-Ellis as Alison, who is excited about being called upon in this police case, for a number of reasons. For one, it’s certainly more exciting and challenging than her day jobs. For two, traversing the hearing world has always been difficult, because, as she tells her mom, she always has to prove herself.
But overall, Alison is a bright and curious woman, and we see just how she interprets what she sees people saying by seeing initial nonsense words on the screen become actual words, filtered through Alison’s knowledge and the context she has about the people she’s watching. But, as we see by the end of the episode, she wants to get involved way beyond reading lips on video feeds. How that is handled by Moulton and the show’s writers will go a long way to determining whether the show has a tight story or flies off the rails of believability.
There’s a grand TV tradition of civilians helping the police because of some special skill they bring to the table, and these civilians always get involved way more than they would in real life, ignoring every warning from the detectives they work with. Do the civilians get away with these violations scot-free, or are there consequences? While we like the gumption Alison shows in trying to get more information without Francis or Marsh around, we’d also like to see there being consequences because of it. The in media res first scene implies that there will be consequences of some sort, but of course those consequences won’t keep Alison from working with Francis and Marsh in subsequent seasons…. er, we mean cases.
The rest of the characters are pretty standard British cop show fare, but they’ll mostly be doing things in reaction to how Alison does her job, which in this case is enough to keep the show interesting.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: After almost getting hit by Liam’s car the night before — he took her to the hospital and missed a meeting with the robbery gang — Alison watches a meeting of the gang and sees Liam saying that he took her himself because he didn’t want to get the cops involved.
Sleeper Star: Fifi Garfield is fun as Alison’s mother Julie. And there’s also Nathan Armarkwei Laryea as DC Ben Lawford, whom Alison suspects is having an affair with one of his colleagues.
Most Pilot-y Line: After Alison gets fired from the bar where she worked part-time, she passes the manager and says, “You know, you could have told me yourself.” Why didn’t he do that? Is it because she’s deaf? Seems like the biggest of chickenshit moves to us.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Code Of Silence hinges on the bright and curious performance of Rose Ayling-Ellis, but it also presents an interesting, somewhat off-beat investigation for her to be involved with.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.