A riveting, documentary-accurate drama about a cop and a system at breaking point. The Respondr, a five-part series created by Tony Schumacher, a former cop turned screenwriter like Olivier Marchal in France, follows a cop on the brink during a handful of night patrols in Liverpool. Let’s be clear, there are way too many cop shows on TV. Suddenly, when the British series was presented in the international Panorama section at the Series Mania festival, expectations were low… But the BBC miniseries, The Responder, broadcast on May 9 and 10 on Canal+, turned out to be a thrilling nocturnal thriller, mixing feverish realism, disturbing gray areas and hard-hitting dark humor. What to reconcile with the genre!
Tony Schumacher spent many years on night patrol in Liverpool before breaking down and giving up his badge. “I had a nervous breakdown. I would have committed suicide if I had stayed there longer. This is a real problem that affects emergency services, not just the police. Many people can no longer cope and commit suicide. If I had stayed there longer, it would have been me, « says the screenwriter that 20 minutes met at Series Mania.
The portrait of a disillusioned cop
He drew on his life experience to create the character of Chris Carson, a disillusioned cop whose sanity, morals and family life have been damaged by many thankless years on the force. “I didn’t want my former colleagues watching TV and thinking Chris was me. But, his sanity, his rising anger, the way he embraces relationships with people, that’s me, definitely,” he says.
Chris Carson is played by Martin Freeman (Fargo, sherlock, The Office) at the top of his game. With his sharp Mersey accent, you can feel the depression that gnaws at him under the outbursts of rage, pain and despair. The actor is sure to win awards for his performance, on par with that of Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown.
Torn between who he wants to be – a good cop, a good father, a good person – and who he is, Chris constantly questions what is right, but what does it mean to be good in his world?
A thrilling crime saga
This chronicle of a cop on the brink turns into a thrilling crime saga when Casey (Emily Fairn), a desperate young drug addict, steals a huge quantity of cocaine… Chris then finds himself embroiled in cases he never should have. to be involved…
A situation that becomes even more complicated when he finds himself in pairs with Rachel (Adelayo Adedayo), a young idealistic recruit, as his new teammate. “The whole aspect of corruption is fiction,” underlines Tony Schumacher. I was not corrupt. But I worked with a Bobby, a police officer who turned out to be. I didn’t know it at the time, but I found out a few years later. »
A system in crisis
Over the course of encounters with a gallery of improbable characters, The Responder questions the limits of a system and implicitly protests against an underfunded and understaffed public service. « We’re talking about the mole game. When you’re a cop, you can never take the time to fix what pops up. Nobody takes the time to fix things. We stick a bandage and we leave, ”laments the screenwriter. A dive into the chaos of a metropolis at night, but also at the heart of a profession and a system in crisis.