The Shadow Line, BBC Two

Hugo Blick's confident conspiracy thriller knows where it's going

by Jasper ReesFriday, 06 May 2011

Poker face: In 'The Shadow Line' Christopher Eccleston plays a fruit’n’veg’n’smack dealer

It’s got more derivations than a dictionary. The Wire has been mentioned in dispatches, as have British conspiracy dramas such as State of Play and Edge of Darkness (in which something is rotten etc). And talking of Denmark, it comes along with The Killing obsessives doing cold turkey. Even its creator has cited the guiding hand of cynical, labyrinthine Seventies crime thrillers – Flight of the Condor and The Parallax View. Put them all together and have you got a series which exists entirely in the long shadow cast by narratives which have passed this way before? Or can The Shadow Line be its own thing?

The world feels somehow so familiar that I half expected Danny Dyer to walk into shot clutching a copy of early Pinter

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