Line of Duty has become stale and tiresome. Mercurio should call it a day

Warning: Spoilers ahead 

Most TV drama series run out of steam sooner or later. Some, like Bodyguard, barely last one season. Even the wonderfully smart Sherlock went on after it should have stopped. The great TV dramas, like Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, finish when they are still at their best. After five seasons, Line of Duty (2012-19) should call it a day or radically reinvent itself.

Of course, it won’t. The BBC are so desperate for ‘event TV’, those rare programmes that win a big live TV audience, that they will flog it to death. Writer Jed Mercurio has the power to let AC-12 go out at the top, but it takes a genius like John Cleese to kill off Fawlty Towers when the execs are longing for more.

The strengths are obvious. The cast has always been terrific, both the central characters (Adrian Dunbar as Ted Hastings, Vicky McClure as Kate Fleming and Martin Compston as Steve Arnott) and the subsidiary characters (Lennie James, Keeley Hawes, Daniel Mays, Thandie Newton, Stephen Graham and Anna Maxwell Martin).

Then there’s Mercurio’s dark vision. Corruption everywhere, the violence, the sad personal lives of the central characters. Which is worse: When Ted Hastings brings Gill Biggeloe back to his seedy room, Steve Arnott’s sad sex scene or Kate Fleming coming home late from work to her angry husband? Line of Duty has caught the mood of May’s Britain. We have come a long way from Dixon of Dock Green.

So, what’s not to like? The stories are becoming increasingly formulaic and predictable. Mercurio likes to kill off his central characters early on: Danny Waldron in Season 3, John Corbett in Season 5, Julia Montague in Bodyguard. It was shocking the first or second time, but it’s becoming tiresome.

Everything we are told in the early episodes is turned upside down. Danny Waldron is a nasty bully. No, he’s not he’s a sad victim. Corbett is a gangland thug. No, he’s an undercover cop with a desperately sad backstory. Hastings is guilty as sin, but then all the charges against him collapse like a house of cards.

The final episode of Season 5 was a classic example. We have seen him take his computer to be wiped? Just getting rid of some porn. Really? How does he explain away the £50,000 in notes in a brown envelope in his room? It’s a bribe he was going to return just as Hastings said. Why didn’t he return it sooner? No explanation. Did he kill John Corbett? Look at the crucial DNA evidence, a strand of his hair on the murdered body. Nope, just planted by someone else. The Northern Ireland sub-plot which could have been the most original part of the whole series? Just a red herring. It went nowhere.

What happens to the villains? Er, nothing. Two (Lisa McQueen and Gill Biggeloe) are released after helping police with their enquiries. Lisa is found a job helping kids avoid a life of crime and she’s smiling. All is well. And the rest of the Organised Crime Group, the whole of Season 5 is about? We never hear about anyone else except for McQueen (a small player by anyone’s standards), the Polish heavy, and young Ryan who becomes a policeman. That is the famous Organised Crime Group who had killed numerous policemen and women, bribed many others and pulled off some astonishing heists, one worth £50 million?

Mercurio, rather like AC-12, can’t be bothered with the actual leg work. He prefers to pull rabbits out of hats to creating a really tight plot which earns its twists and turns. He used to. The earlier seasons were clever and more surprising.  

Line of Duty is about conspiracies. High-up cops trying to hush up paedophile sex rings (Season 3) or corrupt dealings with organised crime (Seasons 4-5). The higher up they are the guiltier they are. They are the real baddies, in their big offices and their fancy suburban homes. This is perfect for a Britain racked by a loss of trust in its politicians and public figures.

Thank goodness for AC-12, incorruptible and courageous. Of course, Hastings isn’t H. He was never going to be. He’s the central character. There’s another season to come. Its already been commissioned. Viewers love him. But who still cares who’s H or what “Dot” Cottan tapped out in morse code as he was dying?

I hope Mercurio will reinvent Line of Duty. Perhaps he could kill off Hastings at the beginning of Season 6 and put Detective Chief Superintendent Patricia Carmichael (Anna Maxwell Martin) in charge of AC-12 and reopen the inquiries into Hastings’s past in Northern Ireland? He won’t. Sorry for the spoiler.