Code of Silence

Alison, a deaf working class girl is enlisted by police to read lips for a case regarding a gang of thieves and their latest caper. When she falls for one of the suspects, things get complicated. Fantastic and tense 6 part mini-series will keep you engaged the entire time. Crackerjack writing and a great performance by Rose Ayling-Ellis are the draws here. If Ellis wasn't deaf IRL i'd say she was a star in the making, but being deaf will limit the amount of roles available to her and that's a shame. COS isn't perfect there are a couple things I found to be not quite believable, but there so minor you won't mind much. I don't see a world where this doesn't at least get a couple BAFTA nods. Extremely enjoyable and highly recommended.

I bingewatched the series over a couple of days.

The first episode was very good but then starts to slide into the same hum drum of many other dramas these days.

The premise of a deaf girl helping police in the cathedral city of Canterbury does seen rather similar to the recent Channel 4 series Patience which had an autistic girl helping police with their enquiries in the cathedral city of York a couple of months ago and it is only just over a month since Rose Ayling-Ellis appeared in Réunion on BBC 1 (she was also in Ludwig late last year set in the cathedral city of Cambridge).

You have to constantly watch the screen as there are a lot of subtitled parts but it wasn't totally engaging and really seemed to lose its way not knowing where the story was heading.

Itv's new liking for 6 part dramas can be a bit much for shows and this was no exception going on too long and included one officer having an affair which didn't really go anywhere in the story and then their was the robbery which really didn't make any practical sense.

Watchable but let's itself down.

I found this show too stressful to watch. The principal character is a young woman Allison, who is a gifted lip reader due to her deafness. In a break from waitressing, she is temporarily recruited by the police of a British city, to lip read surveillance videos. The police clearly warn her, for her own safety and in order not to compromise their investigation, not to research the names or have any contact whatsoever with any of the subjects of the surveillance, who are very dangerous.

So, unbelievably, this is exactly what she does. She takes one foolish risk after another, with no sense of danger, with minimal precautions, and carries on oblivious to police warnings, in order to play detective. In the end, I found it just too stressful to watch, even though Allison was a personally very appealing character in several ways.

I was drawn to the unusual premise, for sure. And the acting is fine. I've watched the first 3 episodes. The problem is, the writing goes off the rails for me. Alison's continual naivety-- blowing off instructions, not thinking through the ramifications of her overly obvious attempts at surveillance, the police team's inexplicably vague explanations --gets old for me. And the willingness of the investigators to go along with Alison's clumsy efforts to infiltrate the mob is just too unrealistic. All this judgement decreases my caring about Alison and that's not helpful. I hope she gets better before episode 6...

Code of silence.

ITV can be hit or miss with its dramas but this one's a hit.

We really enjoyed Code of Silence as it was a bit different for mainstream TV. The story is good enough to justify the show and even though it has more than its fair share of 'aye right' moments it doesn't detract from the overall enjoyment. The show is very well paced and there's no fillers like there are on Netflix.

Rose Ayling-Ellis holds the whole thing together brilliantly. She was absolutely convincing in her role as Alison. She's very likeable even though her character never does a thing she's told. Keiron Moore is also very convincing as Liam. All the main cast are good like Charlotte Ritchie and Andrew Buchan and all are convincing with only the odd one letting the side down. Most of the eff bombs are unnecessary and feel unnatural in places. We don't need them and British TV should not be influenced by the vulgarity plaguing US TV.

We watched on ITVX with the subtitles on even though neither of us are deaf or hard of hearing.

I hope there's a second series of this because we liked it.