LEGAL! Criminal Justice, BBC One, 9.00pm
When a TV show is scheduled so that all the episodes of a series run over a comparatively short space of time, it generally means one of two things: either the show is bobbins and the schedulers know it’s a millstone, and they want to get it removed from their necks in the quickest way possible, or they believe in it so strongly that they want to turn it into Event Television and turn us into their willing slaves. On the basis of the first episode, Criminal Justice is, thankfully, the latter.
It’s a five-parter, and it’s airing at 9pm every night this week, which is admittedly a huge ask of the viewer, especially when there are other things demanding your attention at that hour (Big Brother fans have a hard decision to make, especially if they don’t have access to Channel 4 +1), but I really think it’s going to be worth sticking with, especially as we all want something to distract us and help the time go faster between now and the Doctor Who finale on Saturday, yes?
Ben Whishaw (a recognisable face if you saw Nathan Barley or the movie Perfume amongst other things, and soon to appear as Sebastian Flyte in the film of Brideshead Revisited) stars as Ben Coulter, who accidentally picks up a girl in his dad’s taxi (it makes more sense in the actual programme, don’t worry) on a night out, and what starts as an exciting affair quickly turns into a nightmare when he wakes up in the small hours confronted with her dead body, has no recollection of what happened, and quickly ends up charged with her murder.
It’s not a comfortable watch at all, but episode one is gripping, and I think that scheduling this on consecutive nights may have been a masterstroke, because having to wait a week to find out what happens would have been painful indeed.
