Review: ITV's 'Protection' has all the right ingredients for a very tasty drama ★★★★
New ITV drama Protection debuted this Sunday night.
Protection is a delicious new crime thriller from ITV.
Delivering Line of Duty and Happy Valley vibes, the story moves at a pace and lets the viewer in on police failings within minutes, setting it up for a meaty and twisty story that will have you hooked from the outset.
The brilliant Siobhan Finneran gets to flex her acting muscles as DI Liz Nyles. A woman who on the one hand is clearly passionate about her job - protecting a family on a witness protection scheme at all costs - but on the other, is just as passionate about having an affair with a colleague behind his wife's back.
And it's that colleague, DS Paul Brandice, that creates a major headache for our Liz, when he decides to rock up at the safe house. A place that he apparently shouldn't even know about.
But worse than that, he turns up with a gun shoved down his trousers that he shouldn't even be in position of, and minutes after entering the house, he's shot dead by two masked killers who also shoot dead the very two people that are meant to be protected. Only their daughter, hiding in a toy basket upstairs, is spared... meaning she's now the prime witness.
But what of Brandice? Well, it turns out greedy guts has not one but three phones and one of them happens to have a load of increminating content from DS Nyles on it. Which means, in a slightly implausable scene, she rocks up at outside the house, and even though it's surrounded by cops, she manages to access his car (which for some reason the police couldn’t find) and manages to retrive the phone. Phew.
In the meantime, Katherine Kelly basically reprises her role in ITV drama Liar to play an arsey detective who is tasked with working out how this whole murder mess happened whilst at the same time, having to navigate confidential details which Nyles and her colleagues have to protect under their duty as witness protection officers.
It's all beautifully crafted together and viewers will be itching to get on to episode 2 to get some more answers. Why the hell was Brandice in that house? Is he corrupt or a good guy? How did it all go wrong two days before a major trial and just how much hot water is Liz in?
Siobhan Finneran is the cream which has finally risen to the top, in what really is her first major lead in a drama, which is hard to believe. She's gritty, she's tortured, she's a little bit naughty and she's pissed off with her colleagues. It all makes for a mouthwatering recipe and perhaps ITV's best original drama in a little while.
The good news is you don't have to wait until next Sunday at 9pm to find out, you can watch all six episodes now on ITVX.