Nathan Braniff plays rookie police officer Tommy Foster in Blue Lights, set in Belfast.Christopher Barr/Supplied
Blue Lights is the stand-out police procedural to come out of the United Kingdom in recent years.
The Belfast-set BBC One series – the second season of which is now streaming new episodes weekly on BritBox in Canada – certainly has familiar elements to lure viewers in.
Like so many cop shows, it focuses on rookies: Annie (Katherine Devlin) and Tommy (Nathan Braniff), who are both fresh-faced recruits, and Grace (Siân Brooke), a social worker who is embarking on her second career by joining the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
Then there are elements that remind – and are clearly inspired by – The Wire, David Simon’s classic HBO show set in another unique, divided city that’s a liminal space between north and south: Baltimore.
Sci-fi thriller Pluribus is another layered hit from the creator of Breaking Bad
Blue Lights’ creators Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, like Simon, are ex-journalists and they approach television screenwriting with a similarly sociological seriousness.
This manifests, as in The Wire, with drugs being more than just a McGuffin moving a plot forward; the whack-a-mole futility of the war against them and complexity of the economy that surrounds addiction is fully explored.
What is original to Blue Lights is its depiction of policing, and life in general, in a postconflict society.
The past is not the past in Belfast. The Troubles are still there, like a trove of guns in the first season, waiting to be dug up out of a shallow hole in the ground for the right cause or price.
That initial Blue Lights season brought Annie, Tommy and Grace in close contact with the associates of James McIntyre, a former Irish Republican Army man whose gang ran drugs in a Catholic area the PSNI couldn’t go into without getting side-eyed or worse.
Annie Conlon, played by Katherine Devlin, in the second season of Blue Lights.Christopher Barr/Supplied
To even things out, the second season sees them investigating Loyalist gang activity. An Afghanistan War veteran named Lee Thompson (Seamus O’Hara) attempts to take over the fentanyl trade in his neighbourhood – which he, paradoxically, also wants to return to its previous glory before the toxic drug crisis hollowed it out.
Blue Lights is definitely not an American cop show: In the first episode of the second season, Grace is traumatized when she only has to draw her gun on a disturbed man who has attacked the pharmacist who dispenses his methadone.
The banal day-to-day duties of a police officer that can suddenly turn dangerous are a part of the show alongside season-long arcs.
There is a shocking shooting of a major character in the first season – but, like everything else in the show, it’s not done simply for sensation. That gun death goes on to haunt the entire second season from beginning to end.
This again reinforces the theme that the past is not something you can just ignore or move on from; it turns out not treating violence as mere plot point but something with a long tail of repercussions leads to deeper storytelling and richer, more human characters.
Similarly, the police officers who made mistakes or misbehaved in the first season don’t just disappear. The writing follows them in the second season in new careers and on paths of attempted redemption.
I Love LA? Rachel Sennott’s new HBO show is in more of a situationship with the City of Angels
Happy Kelly (Paddy Jenkins), a lonely older man who kept committing misdemeanours to be arrested in the first season, seemed like a minor side character.
But the story of how as a boy he lost his father and brother to a bombing of a chip shop in the 1970s is followed up in what becomes the most affecting plot line in the second season.
Blue Lights is very interested in truth and reconciliation – and in that it has a lot in common with other Northern Irish TV and film coming out a generation after the Good Friday Agreement – from the Disney+ history series Say Nothing to the hip-hop film Kneecap.
Which isn’t to say that Blue Lights is overly serious, or too dark – the second season gives each of the rookies a will-they, won’t-they romantic relationship.
The one between the widowed constable Steve (an extremely endearing Martin McCann) and single mum Grace – two of the kindest characters on TV – really pulls at the heartstrings.
It’s a metaphor, too, about how hard it is for individuals, like a society, to move on after being hurt.
The second season of Blue Lights won best drama at the British Academy Television Awards in the spring. But a third season has already aired on BBC One overseas – and has already dropped on BritBox in the United States. Canada – where you’ll also currently find the first two seasons of Blue Lights on Kanopy – is behind.
New seasons were first appearing on a Canadian cable channel called BBC First, but a publicist there tells me that, at this stage, it doesn’t have plans to air Season 3.
BritBox Canada had better hurry up and get the rights, then, because it’s very tempting to, like Happy, commit a misdemeanour or two to spend more time with these lovable Northern Irish cops.