Criminal Record isn’t your average police procedural. While it’s a perfectly respectable thriller with compelling characters and performances, its real strength is in how it builds storylines around plucked-from-the-headlines events and contemporary anxieties. Season 2’s villain was an obvious stand-in for Tommy Robinson and other far-right agitators, and found June Lenker (Cush Jumbo) and Daniel Hegarty (Peter Capaldi) trying to navigate policing in an incendiary London cleaved in two by divisive rhetoric, political failings, and institutional inertia. If Apple TV commissions Season 3, it’ll require more of the same, which doesn’t bode well for Britain, where the show is set.
As I type this, parts of Belfast are still smouldering after protesters ostensibly railing against an act of senseless and heinous violence committed by an immigrant began setting cars and houses alight. This is not the first time similar protests have erupted for similar reasons, the flames of which are almost always fanned by the kind of repugnant charlatans who form the basis of Cosmo Thompson (Dustin Demri-Burns), the villain of Criminal Record‘s second season. The inciting event of this season even began with a race-related riot that was stormed by far-right counter-protesters and resulted in a fatal stabbing.
From there, national tensions were whipped up by Cosmo, who produced a propaganda campaign implying that the death of a young boy named Rohaan was faked by the establishment to vilify the far-right. This kind of rhetoric is very common these days, with every national tragedy providing an opportunity for tactical spin to point accusatory fingers at targets of choice. The problem for Criminal Record and a potential third season is that it requires more unrest and national scandal to burn for fuel.
This isn’t mandatory, obviously, but for a show that has built its reputation on this kind of searing relevancy, it’d feel like a step back for a potential third season to exist entirely in the realms of outright fiction, especially with the cat-and-mouse tension between June and Hegarty having seemingly been resolved in the Season 2 finale. At this point, June and Hegarty are finally on the same page, having both lost everything on account of their jobs, with the former especially having suffered a considerable blow following Leo’s sudden and unexpected death.
Given how things ended with Cosmo, there’s a chance that a third season could continue the plot more directly. In the finale, Cosmo made a deal with the authorities, exposing his own domestic terror plot and selling out his friends in exchange for immunity. June and Hegarty are now running him as an asset instead of handing him off to British Intelligence, despite their mutual reservations about his nature, which seems entirely unchanged. He also strongly implied that he — or “one of his fans” — was responsible for planting the bomb on June’s car that ultimately killed Leo, which could be another way to continue the plot into another run of episodes.
But there’s an implicit subtlety to this idea that works better if it remains unaddressed. Cosmo, by his very nature, is the kind of figure who is responsible for things through his rhetoric without being directly responsible in the sense of pulling the trigger for himself. That’s what shields him, and what gives him plausible deniability when he’s pressed. Since the terms of his deal mean that he can only be prosecuted for crimes that carry a life sentence, he’s basically invincible as long as he keeps the law at arm’s length.
Having said this, Cosmo is very much a symptom of the times, and since figures like him don’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon, it could be that Season 3 of Criminal Record intends to focus on his status as an informant as his celebrity continues to grow. That’ll be an interesting dynamic, and Cosmo’s an ingratiating enough villain to feel like returning to him would be worthwhile, but with the state of the political climate at the moment, it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s more horror yet to come which will form an even more topical basis for the next outing.
