Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Protection’ On BritBox, Where A Witness Protection Detective May Have Compromised Witnesses Under Her Watch

When you watch enough British crime drama, you start to see patterns. You have the hard-driving and stressed-out main character whose personal life is a mess. You have corrupt and/or racist detectives. And you have a conspiracy that may reach into the highest ranks of whatever department is being portrayed. We get all that in a new BritBox cop drama.

PROTECTION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a residential neighborhood at night.

The Gist: Amy McLennan (Tilly Kaye), a 12-year-old girl, wakes up in the middle of the night and executes her plan to leave her house. She seems to be chased by bad guys, but when she’s finally found, the person in the car is DI Liz Nyles (Siobhan Finneran); she works in the police department’s witness protection division, and her job is to protect Amy and her family.

The McLennans are in witness protection because Jimmy McLennan (Kris Hitchen) is supposed to testify against an organized crime kingpin, and the family is constantly under threat. As is the protocol in the department, the case’s details are only known to Liz, her partner, DS Raj Kholi (Chaneil Kular) and her boss, DCI Arun Kapoor (Ace Bhatti).

To say the job is stressful is an understatement, especially when it’s compounded by the fact that she’s had to take care of her father Sid (David Hayman) since he had a stroke. One way she blows off steam is through a hot affair with her coworker, DS Paul Brandice (Barry Ward). It’s on the DL because he’s married; he communicates with her via a burner phone.

One morning, Brandice goes to the McLennan’s safe house, even though he shouldn’t know where it is. He’s also brandishing a gun. While he’s inside the house, Amy witnesses her parents not only get attacked by Brandice, but also masked gunman, as well.

When Liz reaches the scene, the lead investigator, DCI Hannah Wheatley (Katherine Kelly) wants to know who they are and who they’re being protected from, something Liz can’t do without an edict from her bosses. Given the fact that Brandice, who was severely injured in the attack, was also there, she wonders if she leaked info to him during one of their many dalliances.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Protection isn’t all that far off from another series where Finneran played a cop: The well-regarded Happy Valley.

Our Take: While it seems like Protection is going to be about the stressful lives of witness protection police officers, in reality the series is a conspiracy thriller, much like similar ones of recent vintage. It definitely rides on Finneran’s performance as Liz, who’s even more stressed by her life than she is by her job. She’s also the best person to figure out how her witnesses were compromised, even if there may be suspicion that she was the one who did the compromising via her affair with Brandice.

The most intriguing aspect of the show is watching Liz get deeper into this conspiracy as she gets isolated from co-workers and perhaps even her family. She’s doing this while not entirely convinced that Brandice didn’t use her for information at some point. But Brandice had some pretty ominous words for her when she visited him in the ICU, and that’s going to drive her investigation, even as she butts heads with Wheatley and the cops trying to get to the bottom of the attack on the McLennans.

Other than Liz, and to a lesser extent her father, are there going to be any characters that are going to go deeper than the usual British cop show stereotypes? We doubt it. But Finneran’s performance might make up for the show’s preponderance of stock characters.

Sex and Skin: There’s a scene where Liz is having sex with Brandice.

Parting Shot: In the ICU, Brandice tells Liz to “trust no one.”

Sleeper Star: Tilly Kaye’s character Amy McLennan seems to have more street smarts and sense than most of the cops on this series.

Most Pilot-y Line: Brandice tells his wife that he’s going out for a run when he’s actually going to have sex with Liz. That’s an awfully long run he’s going to go on.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re willing to give Protection a pass because of Siobhan Finneran’s lead performance, but the show feels like it’s weighed down by a lot of British cop show cliches.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.