‘Criminal Record’ Ends with a Shocking Twist in “Nobody Dies”

Criminal Record’s second season has been particularly timely in a way Season 1 was not. It’s a little disconcerting to sit down to watch a terrorist attack unfold that’s aimed at the Muslim immigrant populations of London, less than a day after Belfast had an honest-to-god pogrom that was driven by social media posts that are not all that dissimilar to the YouTube videos Cosmo has been broadcasting. I almost held off and did this tomorrow, but the dead will still be dead tomorrow, and the mob of white men who did it will still walk free, so there’s no time like the present.

It helps that the series is always at its most riveting when it allows Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo to do what they do best: classically trained theater scenes, either one-on-one or two-on-one. The show already provided the one-on-one earlier in Season 2; now we have the two-on-one, as Hegarty and June tag team Cosmo Thompson in the interview room, in what is really a bad-cop/bad-cop dynamic. (There are no good cops here, Cosmo wouldn’t deserve one anyway.)

Unfortunately, though Dustin Demri-Burns is very good at fast-talking comedy (serious points for his delivery of the “Herman Munster” quip), he’s just not the same caliber of actor as the series's two leads, and it makes the scene a touch grating. Most of it is covered by his fast-talking under Jumbo, and Capaldi can make just about everyone better simply by his own delivery. However, the point of the scene – Cosmo throwing Billy under the bus by claiming he set off the detonator in the woods that killed Marco – isn’t immediately obvious until June pointedly extroplates it on the walk and talk back to the surveillance room.