Beloved dramas create safe spaces within themselves and, for fans of BBC police saga Blue Lights, home is the inside of the squad car driven by Stevie (Martin McCann), when he and partner Grace (Siân Brooke) are parked up and their radios are quiet. Stevie reaching into the back seat and bringing out a plastic box full of sweet treats he has lovingly baked is a sign that all is well.
The opening credits are yet to roll when we get the reassuring sight of Grace and Stevie biting through frosting. But this isn’t just a moment of calm before all hell breaks loose again on their Belfast beat. At the end of season two, the “will-they-won’t-they” between the two main characters became a “yes they definitely will”, and with some time now having passed – Stevie’s got a beard – the couple are browsing for houses together online.
Like Grace and Stevie’s relationship, Blue Lights has evolved. When it began, it was a hard-edged saga about the struggle to police a city where the Troubles are over. Lingering tensions between communities and resentment towards the police, combined with the poverty and drug problems that blight every modern British town, meant trouble flared every day. Offsetting many tense scenes, where it looked as if one of the cops had walked into a lethal ambush, was a weakness for soapy drama based on stifled longing between colleagues at the station. As viewers have got to know and like these people, the soppier character work has started to push the tough sectarian dynamics aside.
“The section’s like a flipping dating shop,” says Stevie on one of the many shared car journeys he and Grace take so we can eavesdrop on their couple chat. “It’s messy.” He might have a point: with fellow “peelers” Tommy (Nathan Braniff) and Aisling (Dearbháile McKinney) also cohabiting, not to mention Shane (Frank Blake) and Annie (Katherine Devlin) still at that tingling maybe stage, the personal might be about to eclipse the political.
The comeback episode shows little sign of the uniquely Northern Irish energies that have previously made Blue Lights shine. Instead of the police having to win the trust of hostile communities where old loyalties and grudges outweigh citizens’ commitment to the rule of law, the situation in Belfast could be from any crime drama. Gangsters have invented a delivery app for premium-grade cocaine, and when bobbies on the beat intercept a junior drug runner and his naive girlfriend on courier duty, the regular police have once again stood on the toes of the organised crime division.
A veteran of cracking Northern Ireland’s toughest gangs, “Colly” Collins (Michael Smiley), arrives at the station to disrupt the hierarchy and rekindle some tricky personal relationships. Meanwhile, at the posh end of town, the opening of a private members’ club ends prematurely when a guest uses the new coke app then overdoses in the bar – but the club’s owner, Dana Morgan (Cathy Tyson), doesn’t seem quite as concerned for his welfare as she should be.
It’s solid urban-decay fare, and the part of the story involving the kids in care swept up into serious crime lets the show put pressure on the weakness in its central relationship: while Stevie is a veteran officer who has learned to live with the police’s limitations when it comes to helping desperate people, Grace is a former social worker who keeps bringing her compassionate instinct to her new job. But as the season goes on, the question of whether their relationship can survive working together is a dramatic uncertainty that’s simply less fun than the old days, when we wondered when they’d finally take down each other’s particulars.
The bad guys are slightly less thrilling, too. That this scary big boss is actually the employee of that other, scarier boss, while this other boss is someone who doesn’t appear to be involved in organised crime at all, is a narrative shape that’s a tad worn, as is the revelation that people involved in one sort of wrongdoing turn out to be perpetrators or victims of different, darker crimes.
When Grace says to Stevie, “We should check it out,” referring to a situation that we know is potentially too dangerous for two cops full of cake to tackle, the pure dread Blue Lights used to instil in us isn’t there any more. We still love it, but in a way that’s safe and familiar. The affair might soon be over.