Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Responder’ On BritBox, Where Martin Freeman Plays A Liverpool Beat Cop Battling Mental Health Issues

If there is anything that ties the roles in Martin Freeman’s career together, it’s a penchant for almost all of them to effectively show rage via facial tics, nose twitches and chin juts (yes, he even did it as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit trilogy). He’s probably the best at showing a man barely keeping it together since Jack Lemmon’s heyday. In The Responder, he plays a cop that’s barely keeping his lava-hot emotions from bubbling over, which seems to be a role made for him.

THE RESPONDER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A man in a therapist’s office. His head is down, and he seems frustrated.

The Gist: Chris Carson (Martin Freeman) tells the therapist he wants to talk but “I’m all wrapped up in here,” he says as he points to his head. He also tells her he has another week of overnight shifts and he thinks he’s going to crack. “I want to be a good bobby,” he says about his job as a patrol cop in a rapid-response unit in Liverpool. “I want to be normal.”

Night 1 of his week of overnights and we see that Carson is already on a razor’s edge, especially when he responds to a neighbor dispute at an apartment building, a visit that he seems to have already made a few times. When he wakes up in the late-afternoon for his shift, he barely has time to spend with his wife Kate (MyAnna Buring) and daughter Tilly (Romi Hyland-Rylands) before going into work. Kate is very concerned that, once his mandated therapy is over, he won’t go back for more.

During his shift, he gets a call from local drug dealer Carl Sweeney (Ian Hart), demanding he find a girl they both know named Casey (Emily Fairn). As much as he’s annoyed that Carl keeps calling him, he also knows that their history together obligates him to help. He instills the help of Marco (Josh Fian), a local corner guy that last saw her. They find her completely wrecked in a heroin den, but Chris lets her go.

As he responds to a wellness check on an elderly lady, he sees that she died of natural causes. As he waits for the medical examiner, he has to balance talking to her grandson with getting angry calls from Carl about letting Casey go; she owes him and need to see her. He finds her again, and when she brings him to the rendezvous with Carl, she tells him that she lost a massive brick of cocaine that Carl trusted her with. Instead of leaving her to get beaten to a pulp by Carl and his thugs, he takes her out of there.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Responder feels like it’s part of the same family of “cop who’s about to crack” British police procedurals that gave us shows like Prime Suspect. It definitely seems like a genre that the Brits are really good at.

Our Take: The Responder was created by Tony Schumacher based on his real-life experiences as a police officer, and the idea that there’s a patrol team that’s dedicated to quick response to calls gives the show a bit of a unique angle. Usually, we’re seeing shows about detectives, not beat cops, mainly because detectives lead investigations.

Schumacher puts Carson in a unique spot, though. He’s a former inspector whose mental health issues have led to a demotion, but he’s still determined to do a good job because he feels it’s a way to overcome the issues that have been getting in his way. But not only is the grind of the job getting to him, but the fact that he’s beholden to scum like Carl means he truly doesn’t feel like he does anything good during his day to day.

In the hands of an actor other than Freeman, The Responder would probably be a watchable but forgettable procedural. But Freeman is such an expert at expressing barely contained rage, whether it’s in drama or comedy, that he makes Carson a compelling figure. Anyone who’s a fan of Freeman’s work knows the tics: arched eyebrows, a slight turning of his chin, that perturbed look on his face that shows just how much he’s seething at that moment.

Carson is ready to blow at any time, as we see when he’s sent back to mediate the same neighbor dispute yet again. And Freeman plays both the rage he’s feeling about being there once again and the decency he shows the neighbor that he attacks with a flurry of fists when he thinks the guy has a knife. The show has enough of a sense of humor about itself that it can lighten the mood ever so slightly, showing the little ways that Carson keeps his emotions in check.

What we hope to see as the series goes forward is how he plays off Rachel Hargreaves (Adelayo Adedayo), a rookie partner who is still idealistic about the job. We also hope to see the circumstances that led to his demotion and what fed into his current fragile mental state. But we’re also on board for all of Freeman’s attempts to show Carson barely functioning, and what might happen if and when he actually snaps.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: After getting a threatening message from Carl, Carson contemplates his situation, tears up, then stops and tries to push it down in order to continue his day.

Sleeper Star: MyAnna Buring is in an interesting spot as Kate Carson; she definitely thinks she and Chris are teetering on the edge because of his issues, and wants him to keep going with the therapy, even including her in the process. It’ll be interesting to see how her role expands during the season.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Marco says he has a kid, Carter asks him how old he is. “Eighteen,” Marco says. “Fuck. You look about fourteen,” replies Carter. “There we go again, you being rude,” replies Marco.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If the only reason why you watch The Responder is to see Martin Freeman barely hold it together, then it’s a pretty good reason to watch the show. The rest of the plot is incidental to a performance by Freeman that utilizes all of his copious ability to be the aggrieved everyman who’s ready to crack at any moment.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.