Blue Lights

“Don’t sleep on Blue Lights. It’s well-crafted, fantastically tense, thrilling stuff. As in Grey’s Anatomy, the idea of chucking a load of naive newcomers into a horribly stressful and dangerous environment for which they are inevitably unprepared all but guarantees excitement.”
Rebecca Nicholson, The Guardian

“This is a complicated, cleverly observed, funny and (at times) horrific drama that is a cut above your average police procedural. I can’t recall ever seeing a TV drama about probationary officers before and this does it well without relying too much on cop show cliché. It shows the violent resistance that police in Belfast still face in certain areas, without ever letting the bleakness override the humanity.”
Carol Midgley, The Times

“Bad things happen – there is one horrible scene of a kneecapping – and the show deals with sectarianism and drugs gangs, but it isn’t unremittingly dark or overly political. There is real warmth in the friendships between the officers, and plenty of lightness in the divide between the probationers and the old hands. By the end, you will have a real fondness for these characters.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“Blue Lights is a fast-moving ensemble drama, with a seriously good cast. The action sequences are full of grit and violence, with a mob on every city corner ready to lob bricks and bottles. But there’s a broad streak of humour, too, as the officers sit in their cars bickering over playlists and swapping stories of novices who flunked their training.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“With the mean streets of Belfast as backdrop, the Line of Duty vibes remained strong throughout. But Blue Lights was more subtle than the average cop show. This was slice-of-life storytelling that tried to depict the everyday grind of police work. At a time when every police show feels like an action movie on a shoestring, Blue Lights managed to stand out from the crowd.”
Ed Power, The i

“It seems unkind to mark down any drama that tries to find its way through the continuing tensions in Northern Ireland, but the problem with BBC One’s Blue Lights is that there’s no one to really root for. All the characters in the story are either loathsome or pathetic, with some a mix of both. What the writers, Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, do get very right is the sense of sheer exhausting frustration of policing a place where the usual challenges are overlaid with ethnic-national hatreds and the ever-present possibility of assassination.”
Sean O’Grady, The Independent