{"id":353896,"date":"2025-12-17T10:40:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T10:40:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/353896\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T10:40:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T10:40:07","slug":"the-50-best-tv-shows-of-2025-no-5-blue-lights-television","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/353896\/","title":{"rendered":"The 50 best TV shows of 2025: No 5 \u2013 Blue Lights | Television"},"content":{"rendered":"

There haven\u2019t been many police dramas quite like Blue Lights<\/a>. While it might feel as if you\u2019re simply watching a superior spin on a generic format \u2013 the gritty, urban cop show \u2013 Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson\u2019s Belfast-set thriller is actually an outlier. Paradoxically, police procedurals usually work as entertainment because the police defy the procedures. The rule-breaking maverick cop is among the sturdiest of all TV archetypes. Blue Lights is the opposite. It works so brilliantly because it\u2019s a stickler for the rules. It has to be.<\/p>\n

Rule-breaking mavericks generally come a cropper in Blue Lights. Shane (Frank Blake) nearly loses his career because of some shady evidence-gathering via a mobile phone. When Aisling (Dearbh\u00e1ile McKinney) pays an after-hours visit to a domestic violence suspect, catches him abusing his wife and arrests him, she doesn\u2019t get a pat on the back; she is suspended for behaving like a vigilante.<\/p>\n

But the strictly procedural nature of Blue Lights isn\u2019t a killer of tension \u2013 it\u2019s the source. Has there been a more terrifying cliffhanger in recent TV memory than the ambushed suspect convoy in episode five of this third season? It began with an ominous question from HQ (\u201cIs your vehicle armoured or soft-skinned?\u201d) and culminated in a visibly panicking Grace (Si\u00e2n Brooke) pleading \u201cWill someone tell me what to do?!\u201d The stomach-churning dread lay in the powerlessness of the car\u2019s passengers \u2013 at this point, we can trust that Grace isn\u2019t going to go rogue as she might in a lesser show. She isn\u2019t going to perform a ludicrous manoeuvre or take out a van-full of paramilitaries on her own. Salvation will come (if it comes at all \u2013 after all, if the writers can kill Gerry, they can kill anyone) from someone on the other end of a radio following procedure properly.<\/p>\n

Flawed, likable \u2018Peelers\u2019 \u2026 Blue Lights. Photograph: BBC\/Two Cities Television<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a wider powerlessness at play here too, which gives Blue Lights real historical weight. While the cocaine trade is the basic plot-driver, even that has a subtext. Many British people did their best to ignore what was effectively a civil war going on in a corner of their country for nearly three decades. The Good Friday agreement of 1997 meant it could be forgotten completely. But for many communities it continues, as a menacing ambient hum. And its parameters \u2013 both political and social \u2013 are too big to reckon with. Convincingly, and with real humanity around the emotional costs, Blue Lights mines the long tail of the Troubles for tension and narrative force. Cops still routinely check under their cars for bombs. Sometimes, they still find them.<\/p>\n

After the Good Friday agreement, many former combatants simply transferred their talents into drug dealing. In fact, Michael Smiley\u2019s intelligence officer Paul \u201cColly\u201d Collins seems sardonically nostalgic about the clear lines and perverse moral clarity of the Troubles. He recalls a lengthy conversation with an IRA gunman about the Catholic theological rationale for a just war. The good old days, eh? It turns out that organised crime gangs are even less biddable and more volatile than sectarian paramilitary groups. Again, this is not a situation that invites maverick approaches to police work. Being a maverick could get you killed.<\/p>\n

Granite hard \u2026 Blue Lights. Photograph: BBC\/Two Cities Television<\/p>\n

And this is where we find the flawed, likable \u201cPeelers\u201d of Blackthorn station, with their delicious cupcakes and clandestine tequila parties and Westlife fixations. How can normal police reckon with history like this? They can\u2019t, and the result is trauma. There\u2019s enough genuine anguish to make moments that might otherwise seem emotionally exploitative feel fully earned. After the death of her mother, the parish priest tells Annie (Katherine Devlin) that \u201cthis world is mainly faith versus shite\u201d. As the shite piles up, how do the coppers keep that faith?<\/p>\n

Tommy (Nathan Braniff) and Sandra (Andi Osho) sit on a sofa, listening to an elderly man with dementia play Gerry\u2019s favourite Kris Kristofferson song. It\u2019s incredibly moving, and hits home in the context of the brutally unsentimental police work that surrounds it \u2013 the severed femoral arteries, the desperate teenage runaways, the realpolitik of having to watch the gangster who killed your husband walk free and not knowing what deals have been done to make this unavoidable. Blue Lights gets away with being softly sentimental every now and then, because it\u2019s granite hard too.<\/p>\n

Since it launched in 2023, critics have cast around for shows resembling Blue Lights. It\u2019s usually a good sign when nothing much springs immediately to mind. There are traces of Line of Duty\u2019s intense pocketbook precision. Its ensemble cast maintaining an uneasy balance between work and domesticity occasionally recalls 1980s US classic Hill Street Blues. But increasingly, it bears comparison to HBO\u2019s Baltimore epic The Wire. It is constructing a loving, despairing, characterful portrait of a city. It examines dysfunctional municipal systems through the perspectives of the people trying to work within them. Each season builds on the work of the last, creating a richer, fuller picture. And it finds big contexts for its smallest constituent parts. To borrow The Wire\u2019s tagline, in Blue Lights, all the pieces matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There haven\u2019t been many police dramas quite like Blue Lights. While it might feel as if you\u2019re simply…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-353896","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}