For those obsessed with David Fincher’s odyssey through America’s prolific serial killers in Mindhunter, Netflix has a new crime thriller – and it looks tremendous.
Criminal will hit the streaming platform in later this month, and is centred around the best part of shows like Mindhunter and Line of Duty: interrogation rooms.
The 12-part series will tell a fresh, juicy crime story with each episode. But here’s the interesting bit: they’re spread across four countries.
Check out the trailer below:
Taking place across the UK, Spain, France and Germany, Netflix say it’s a ‘stripped down cat-and-mouse drama’ focusing on ‘the intense mental conflict between the police officer and the suspect in question’.
Broadchurch alumni David Tennant is set to be the focal point of the first episode; charged with murdering his teen step-daughter.
The new series boasts an impressive roster of talent: Agent Carter and Black Mirror‘s Hayley Atwell; Spain’s Inma Cuesta and Emma Suárez; former Royal Shakespeare Company member Youssef Kerkour; Bodyguard‘s Shubham Saraf and Nicholas Pinnock from Marcella.
Check out the full casting announcement trailer below:
With every episode set within the confines of an interrogation room, observation booth and corridor, it looks to be a pulse-pounding showcase of delicious storytelling and remarkable performances.
For showrunner George Kay – who worked on BBC’s Killing Eve – it’s exciting to helm a new episodic police-themed story.
As reported by Variety, Kay said:
Since The Sopranos and The Wire serial drama has really held everyone’s attention in the last decade or so.
So it’s really exciting to bring back an episodic story which is police-themed. TV viewers worldwide are so fluent in how TV works, able to appreciate an original show and their own remake.
While each story is played out through the same template, the variations in nationality make for interesting changes, Kay says.
Mariano Barroso, who directed all of Criminal’s Spain episodes, told Variety: ‘The police and the accused behave differently in different countries since they come from different cultures, and that for me was very enriching, innovative, original.’
Kay added:
We were able to take a proposal for a TV series which is very different from most drama, much more actor-orientated.
We have so many big visual high-scale action dramas on our TVs to watch. Here we talked to actors, directors and writers who all wanted to focus on character.
For the binge-prone out there, this looks like the latest addictive crime treat. Buckle up: it’s going to be intense.
Criminal will be released on Netflix on September 20.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.