Collateral is a gripping thriller in need of a tighter script – episode one review

Last night, John Simm’s New Labour luvvie in Collateral, BBC Two's four-part political thriller, was pitted against John Simm’s grieving class warrior in ITV’s psychodrama Trauma. In all honesty, though, the casting of Carey Mulligan, not as the usual sweet waif à la Suffragette, but a spiky detective in Collateral, was far more interesting. As DI Kip Glaspie, she defied expectations in the opening episode, bringing gravitas to a role she admitted in a recent interview she thought herself unsuitable for. 

Written by David Hare – the award-winning auteur with whom Mulligan worked on a 2014 production of his play, Skylight – Collateralis an inherently exciting state-of-the-nation piece, a patchwork of meticulously researched storylines concerning gun violence and immigration, knitted together with terrific performances and noirish direction from S J Clarkson (Jessica Jones, Life on Mars). 

The plot – about the shooting of a Syrian pizza delivery man – moved fast, ricocheting from one story arc to the next. Blink and you’ll have fallen behind as viewers were introduced to several disparate characters, all apparently connected, from gay female vicar Jane (Nicola Walker), to ketamine-addled young clubber Linh (Kae Alexander), to rebellious Labour MP David (Simm), to posh single mother Karen (Billie Piper), who lives in the mansion block where the murder took place. 

Nuance wasn’t in the opener’s lexicon. Gripping though it was, it was also riddled with clunking exposition, some of which, frankly, tickled me. Take the scene in which David lay in bed with his new girlfriend Suki (Kim Medcalf). “We’ve got to sort this out,” she turned to him. “We can’t go on like this... We’ve been on three dates.” Later, she wrote him a letter with the kind of emotions you’d expect from 10 years of marriage, not a brief fling! If Hare was truly tapped into the zeitgeist, he’d know that the modern dating world is far more cutthroat than that. 

Worse still was how, in another scene, a forensic officer crowbarred in the mention of Glaspie’s unlikely backstory – she was a professional pole-vaulter – with all the subtlety of an automatic weapon. 

Hare does have form for this, though. Yes, he’s one of this country’s most venerable playwrights, but let’s not forget his last foray into television was hobbled by heavy-handed dialogue, too (Salting the Battlefield, which concluded his Worricker Trilogy in 2014). With a set-up this tantalising, what a shame it would be if Collateral’s script doesn’t settle down.