BBC2 has a new drama series for Friday nights. The main character is a world-weary middle-aged police inspector with an unshakeable commitment to smoking. His work partner is a feisty female officer in her twenties who combines salt-of-the-earth irreverence with being a damn good cop. Between them, they’re investigating the murder of an attractive young woman who their colleagues immediately assumed was a prostitute, and whose death reminds the inspector of a previous investigation that continues to haunt him — which is why his boss is constantly trying to take him off the case.
But if this makes you think that The City & The City is yet another identikit crime drama, then you couldn’t be more wrong. The basic storyline may be thoroughly conventional; but only, it seems, as a deliberate counterpoint to the intriguing and highly imaginative strangeness of the setting.
Inspector Borlu (David Morrissey) does his policing in the city of Beszel, a place that goes beyond the merely fictional and into the realms of mythical.
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