TV Pick of the Week: Better - Review by Yvette Huddleston

Leila Farzad plays DI Lou Slack, a respected Leeds detective who has risen steadily up the ranks. What her colleagues don’t know is that for the past nearly twenty years she has been in the pay of local drug baron Col McHugh (a suitably chilling performance from Andrew Buchan). The pair met when they were both starting out – McHugh had recently arrived in West Yorkshire after leaving his native Northern Ireland because of a turf war while Slack was following in the footsteps of, and trying to impress, her celebrated police officer father – and over the years have developed a close, almost sibling-like bond. In the first few minutes of the opening episode, we see exactly the kind of thing that Lou is obliged to do for Col – she cleans up a crime scene, obviously a drug deal gone wrong, where a young man lies dying from a gunshot wound on the floor. She coolly steps over him to retrieve the gun, then leaves.

Lou’s builder husband Ceri (Samuel Edward-Cook) knows about her duplicity and feels uneasy about it, but he has also benefitted from it – McHugh bailed him out when his business was about to go bankrupt and he works as a construction manager for McHugh’s ‘legitimate’ building company. Then Lou and Ceri’s son Owen (Zak Ford-Williams) falls ill with meningitis and very nearly dies. As Lou sits anxiously by Owen’s hospital bed, she makes a deal with herself: “Please don’t die, I’ll be better.”

After Owen’s recovery she begins to look at ways in which she might extricate herself from her arrangement with Col and that includes paying a visit to one of her father’s former colleagues, corrupt cop Vernon Marley (outstanding work from Anton Lesser). As she questions him about what happened when he came clean, Marley senses that her interest is more than casual and as the narrative unfolds, he becomes an unlikely ally.

Once Lou realises that her only way out is to bring Col down, a taut and compelling game of cat-and-mouse begins and the narrative tension builds. The encounters between the two become increasingly spiky and strained, expertly played by Farzad and Buchan, as the drip-fed revelations lead to a very clever, satisfying conclusion.