The bad... redux

I guess I should apologize to the makers of Safe House. Last week I droned on about how this was the worst thing I’d seen on TV in 2017. With only 10 days left in the year I doubted it was possible for anything worse to come along. Then along came Bancroft.

With a stellar cast of Sarah Parish, Kenneth Cranham, Art Malik and, er, Ade Edmonson it sounded like a good drama, but it started off badly, went downhill fast and ended in the gutter. Somehow it managed to take all the bad things in Safe House and crank them up a notch.

I poked fun at Safe House for ‘restaging’ a scene from Line of Duty. Bancroft went one better and ‘restaged’ the entire plot from LoD, with cops shooting cops, evidence tampering, cops interrogating cops, secret meetings in a police van etc all happening in exactly the same points in the story. Except LoD had Ted Hastings and his meticulously gathered stack of compelling evidence to destroy the bad guy and Bancroft had Eddie Hitler and his illegally obtained used condom (don't ask) so Bancroft walked away without a stain to her character.

Safe House had a daft solution to the murder mystery, so Bancroft went one better with the killer, who was straight, killing her lesbian lover because the lover had only pretended to love her in revenge for having had an affair with her husband, or something like that.

Safe House failed to have a single scene that made sense because nothing was explained, so Bancroft went one better and had stuff that could never make sense even if everything was explained. At one point the title character fire-bombed the house of the key witness she was supposed to be protecting as part of her cunning plan to discredit another cop, and got away with it, and this didn’t even get in the top 5 implausible things to happen between the commercial breaks.

I’ve always thought there should be more shows where the bad guy is the main character and they get away with it. Then I watched Bancroft. I never want to see another show do that again.