Bodyguard

BBC One 2018 6 episodes. Created and written by Jed Mercurio. Starring Richard Madden, Keeley Hawes, Claire-Louise Cordwell, Tom Brooke, Stuart Bowman.

Jed Mercurio created and wrote the Line of Duty series, a thriller acclaimed even by the extremely high standards of BBC broadcast. So when it was announced he was doing another thriller / police / spy / intrigue series, the stars lined up. Richard Madden is perhaps best known as the ill-fated Robb Stark in Game of Thrones. Claire-Louise Cordwell and Keeley Hawes are both alumni of Line of Duty. Tom Brooke is best known to American audiences as the Angel Fiore from Preacher and in an unsettling coincidence, Lothar Frey from Game of Thrones. I wonder if he and Madden have attended any weddings together of late? Bowman was one of the nastiest, sleaziest characters ever filmed, in 2015’s Slow West.

It was a match made in television heaven, and the first episode does not disappoint. It begins with a tense standoff between protagonist David Budd (Madden) and a middle-eastern bomber on a train while Budd’s children sleep unconcernedly in the next carriage. He defuses the situation with no loss of life, no shots fired, and the suspects in custody (in the UK, this is considered good police work, despite the lack of a body count or lots of collateral damage). As a result he is promoted to be bodyguard to a high-ranking government official, Home Secretary Julie Montague (Keeley Hawes) an ambitious and ruthless politician who was one of the biggest hawks in the UK’s ill-considered forays into Afghanistan and Iraq. We learn that Budd, a veteran, has both emotional and physical scars from those conflicts. By the end of the episode, we learn that Budd has some interesting associates who share his feelings about those bush wars.

The acting, writing and direction are superior throughout, and Mercurio is very spare in his exposition, letting the actors tell the story in cues for the viewer to pick up. The storyline is fairly linear, but the characters reveal interesting and unexpected facets adding layers of intrigue and sophistication.