Even Happy Valley’s Siobhan Finneran can’t save Protection from mediocrity

Despite a fine lead performance, this ITV crime drama never quite transcends genre cliches

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“If you start running out of leads,” the detective in ITV’s new six-part drama, Protection, muses, “maybe you missed something right at the start.” It’s a philosophy of sleuthing that doesn’t seem to be shared by the British TV establishment, who mostly ran out of ideas a long time ago. And Protection is – from its inception – a retread of the most familiar beats of our vast police procedural landscape.

Down a suburban cul-de-sac, a seemingly normal family of three live in increasingly paranoid isolation. They are in witness protection, because the dad, Jimmy McLennan (Kris Hitchen), will imminently be testifying against crime lord Edward Crowther (Alec Newman). The McLennans’ temporary sanctuary is overseen by DI Liz Nyles (Siobhan Finneran), a specialist officer “firewalled” from the rest of the police to protect her charges’ identities. But on the eve of Jimmy’s court appearance a gunman slaughters the family – with only 13-year-old Amy (Tilly Kaye) surviving – and questions start being asked of DI Nyles. How did the ring of protection around the McLennans fail? And why was a police officer – who was also, rather inconveniently, Liz’s lover – in their house at the time of the attack?

This is a tried and tested formula. You take a specialised branch of the police – anti-corruption (Line of Duty), pathology (Silent Witness), political protection (Bodyguard) – and draw them out into a larger story. A larger story, that is, that resembles a classic police procedural. The beats are instantly familiar, right down to the protagonist’s troubled home life. In Protection, that takes the form of a truculent father (David Hayman), who has a personal history in the police that he is starting to lose to dementia. “I knew everyone,” he tells his daughter. “Trouble is, can I remember them?” The familiarity with this formula means that cliche is all but inevitable.

At any time – the series tells us in an opening title card, establishing the faux-seriousness of the premise – there are around 3,000 people in the UK under witness protection. The show is written by Australian scribe Kris Mrksa (who has previously worked for the BBC on shows like Requiem and The Slap) who calls it a “le Carré-esque conspiracy thriller”. In reality, it’s really neither an exposé of an under-reported part of the police, nor a taut spy drama. Instead, it’s entirely of a piece with the fare we are constantly served by ITV (and other domestic broadcasters), whether that’s set on a submarine (Vigil), in a bomb disposal unit (Trigger Point) or in the torrential rain (After the Flood).

Siobhan Finneran with Sarah Lancaster in Happy Valley (BBC/Lookout Point/Matt Squire)

Because it is a well-worn story, it requires a familiar face. Finneran (superb in Happy Valley, which successfully subverted many of these tropes) is a reliable performer, bringing a down-to-earth vulnerability to the lead role. The script doesn’t give her much in the way of wit, but she is effective as a flawed heroine. “I’m drowning,” she confesses to her hospitalised lover. The “defective detective” is an over-exposed trope, but “being quite crap at your job” is a fairly original defect. Despite the insistence of ITV’s promotional documents, this isn’t quite le Carré’s world of half-competent men bearing responsibility for the fate of the world, but it does slightly undercut the everyman hero dynamics we see so often. Other police officers – hard-nosed Wheatley (Katherine Kelly) and beady-eyed Bewley (Andrew Knott) – are more familiar archetypes.

ITV are not trying to do something new with Protection. Quite the opposite: they’re trying to provide living rooms across the nation with more of the same. More of that thing you quite enjoyed a few months ago, but which has largely slipped your memory. Something that, by the summer, you’ll have forgotten about, ready to be replaced in your mind by – I don’t know ­– a five-part thriller about mounted crowd control officers discovering a plot to blow up Wembley. Nothing new, nothing memorable, but nothing much to object to either.

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