Informer (BBC, 2018)

[Thomas]

A young man becomes a police informant. It's on Netflix, six episodes. If you've not seen it, avoid my spoiler banners.

In slightly more detail,

Spoiler alert

a young British-Pakistani man, Raza, is coerced into becoming a police informant to protect his family

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.

It's tense and gripping, and every scene is full of character and story detail. By episode two, I was surprised at how strong a sense I had of each character and their complex motivations. The series explores loads of very current ideas - institutionalised racism, spycops, miscommunication,[nb]

Spoiler alert

the police waste a lot of time - and risk Raza's life - chasing someone who turns out to be an MI6 asset, a fact that is kept from the them the entire time.

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[/nb] radicalisation, class - but without feeling like an essay. It's all organically woven into a story about people and their relationships.

Some of the themes - especially in

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Paddy Considine's

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character - dovetail with the subject of the Telegraph's excellent Bed of Lies podcast,[nb]I know - the Telegraph?![/nb] which I happened to be listening to when I started watching Informer. I recommend slinging that down your ears.

Great cast, natural dialogue, perilous atmosphere. Several shocking sequences.[nb]particularly memorable is

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the moment a police officer's cover is blown.

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[/nb] My only real problem was the colour grading. If anything is remotely blue, you'll know about it.

[paruses]

Finally finished watching the other night. Had an impromptu break in he middle due to a couple nights of shit internet but otherwise watched an episode a night almost like in the old days of television.

Not a huge amount to add to what you said but I really enjoyed it. It was nicely tense and without being exhausting. Paddy Considine's slightly weird speech patterns put me off a bit. Maybe he always talks like that but he seemed to have a mid atlantic accent when he was being his real character and used his Burton-On-Trent accent with some odd cockney undercoat when he had to be Charlie. He as wonderfully menacing, as he was supposed to be, but those accents pulled me out of it a bit.

I liked all of the non-police characters. Thought every performance there had real depth. Lots of lovely bits of misdirection but not to the point where you would gasp at The Twist each time. Everyone's motive was just nicely opaque like in real life.

Only exception to that would be the reveal over The Incident 3/4 of the way through the last episode. I didn't feel it quite fit in with the character and where desperation might lead him. Interesting and pleasing that there was about 1/4 of a programme left to deal with some aftermath and it was done with a light but firm touch.

Also agree with your third footnote - I'd made the mistake of reading the spoiler (my own choice) so knew what was coming but even so it was pretty brutal.

Loved the Albanians - made me want to be an Albanian gangster. Might get me a 3/4 length leather jacket and ease into it though.