Justice

I am sorry that this series was cancelled after one season. Justice was different from other crime shows and had a different perspective and focal point; a older judge in a community court instead of the usual police procedurals.

The actor Robert Pugh is different from the standard protagonist, older, wiser and round, but with a steel core. The cast seemed to be good, and the story line progressing well, with a strong sense of a community coming together.

Out of all the shows, this was different and deserved at least a few seasons.

This was one of the best I have ever seen and I want it to continue until resolution.

The only thing going for this short series is that I didn't have to invest a lot of time in it. After enjoying Jody Comer's excellent work in Killing Eve I was looking forward to Justice. Unfortunately the story was cliche and uninteresting. What made it exponentially worse was the sound editing. Background music is called "background" for a reason. Likewise for ambient noise such as traffic and pub sounds. On a scale of 1 to 10, if people are speaking at level 4, the music and other sounds should not be at level 9. This just makes the dialog unintelligible, and if you can't hear the story there is no point in telling it.

Add to that an unsatisfactory and confusing ending that was squeezed into the last 10 minutes of the last episode and you just end up with a colossal failure.

This new series of 5 programmes is endlessly surprising. Just when you thought you had it figured out, another deft piece of writing intervenes and you have to take stock. Superficially this is a cartoon strip of 'A day in the life...... of a socially deprived part of Liverpool'. At this level it is reminiscent of the trivial American TV series 'The Father Dowling Mysteries', but Justice is much more remarkable than that. There is an undercurrent of originality and nuance, exquisite observation and lightness of touch that made me watch all 5 programmes on the trot and to want to know who had written/directed it. A relief from the unrelenting brutality and extremes of Waking the Dead or CSI, this is a true realism with heart.

I started watching this, and stuck with it in the hope that it would improve as the episodes went by. It did not! The story line is a pointless one that seems to go back and forth without ever resolving issues. Particularly annoying is the editing that uses 2 second screen shots, scattered throughout each episode that are irrelevant to the main scene. This began with the first episode and just made the story line even more confusing. Characters seemed disconnected and it took forever (and many episodes) to piece together what was happening. For a series with such a small payoff, it is a chore to get through it. One suspects that the creators were hoping for a second series but that apparently did not happen.