SERIES PREMIERE: This international experiment in TV drama takes the same confined setting – a high-tech police interrogation room – and populates it with different sets of actors playing investigators, with each episode devoted to interrogating a different suspect. There are four series in all, and all premiere today on Netflix.
Criminal: United Kingdom is the easiest entry point, because it’s all in English, and the defendant in the first case is played by guest star David Tennant. Other series in this global effort include
Criminal: Spain, Criminal: Germany and
Criminal: France, and they’ll all presented in their original languages, subtitled. (Start with
Spain.) Whatever the language,
Criminal is in the spirit of such aggressively claustrophobic, purely conversational shows as
In Treatment. What it isn’t, clearly, is as artistically dynamic as the police-interrogation TV episode that still stands as the gold standard in this regard: Tom Fontana’s “Three Men and Adena” episode of NBC’s
Homicide: Life on the Street. This 1993 episode is more than 25 years old now, and, as an intense extended interrogation scene, remains unbeaten and unequalled.
For a full review, see David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower.