Summary
Criminal Code expands its scope in Season 2, providing a more ambitious and complex outing that pushes its luck in terms of pacing and payoff.
Do you remember Criminal Code? It was a surprising international hit for Netflix when it first debuted in 2023, delivering eight episodes of rigorously intensive policework that never quite gelled with its obvious intention to sculpt a more multifaceted and made-for-TV mythology. The bad news for those who really appreciated the Brazilian show’s forensic attention to procedural minutia may well end up being disappointed by Season 2, which sheds some of that detail and embraces the sprawl suggested by the first season’s finale.
This doesn’t make Season 2 bad, per se; on the contrary, it’s pretty good in many respects. But it does create a weird internal conflict wherein the stuff the show’s best at, which sets the first season apart in a crowded crime landscape, ends up chafing against the ambition to fold in another gang, betrayal, death, or institutional calamity. It turns a show that was about something very specific into a show that’s largely about one thing after another.
But the underlying shape is still there. This remains, fundamentally, a story about federal law enforcement going up against the criminal underworld, and while there are personal stakes, that was never really the point, even in the first season. Instead, the big-picture storytelling imagines a web of geopolitical conflict operated by the levers of expansive law enforcement and criminal apparatuses, two sides of the same coin working in parallel as much as in opposition.
Crucially, Season 2 of Criminal Code hasn’t abandoned that focus on forensic detail, even if it’s now being used in service of a much bigger and more ambitious narrative. The great coup of the first season was that it was able to bundle up the heft of prestige TV and the can’t-stop-watching allure of a cat-and-mouse thriller into the procedural detail itself, giving scientific process and attention to detail its own kind of compelling urgency.
That’s still here, and interestingly, the same approach to evidence underpins the complex administrative fallout of the show’s various heists, prison breaks, and political tear-ups. Criminal Code is very good at framing its action in terms of its political and territorial relevance, and at no point did I ever expect to enjoy this element as much as I did. There’s still an argument to be made that it can go a little too far and bog down the pacing, which was my primary criticism of the first season, but there’s a strong chance I’m alone in that complaint.
A still from Criminal Code Season 2 | Image via Netflix
You might have noticed that none of this framing creates a meaningful distinction between the cops and robbers, which is entirely the point. On a thematic level, the series is more about institutional rot broadly and how it relates to personal ambition specifically. Imagine a revenge story in which retribution is contingent on filing the necessary paperwork, and you have a good sense of the vibe. It sounds horrendously dull, but that’s the neatest trick. It’s often truly riveting and, perhaps more to the point, very distinct in a genre landscape crowded with the most cartoonish and surface-level interpretations of these ideas.
In this way, it’s reminiscent of a series – also on Netflix – that I reviewed, Sara – Woman in the Shadows. It might seem like an odd comparison, but it too had a somewhat blasé approach to the idea of institutional ineptitude, moral decay, and political gridlock that suggested these things could never be truly toppled, but had to be learned to live with. If personal resolution can be achieved in spite of all that, then, well, all the better.
Criminal Code is very good at resigning both its characters and its audience to the idea that the usual binary win/loss terms of a crime thriller aren’t at play here. Every aspect of the production is designed to reiterate a sobering realism that is beneficial to the show’s overall identity, even as it loses some of that tight specificity in Season 2 as the scope becomes unwieldy and eight episodes – which felt like too many in the first season – scarcely feel like enough to chronicle it all. Indeed, the ending leaves the door open for Season 3 by refusing to answer a lot of questions, explore several dynamics, or take narrative chances that go beyond the admittedly ballsy commitment to investigative process.
If Season 3 arrives – and, to be clear, I not only think it will but would be pleased to see it – then it needs to become narrower, not wider; it needs to hone in on its most essential ideas and really interrogate them instead of presenting them without comment. The problem with blowing a season open and then banking on getting another to handle all of the closure is that the sheer amount of moving parts can feel overwhelming, and that’s the mire Criminal Code finds itself stuck in during not-insignificant stretches of this second season. It’s still exceedingly well made and has a distinct vibe and identity, but it’s starting to push its luck.
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