{"id":476607,"date":"2025-10-05T20:23:21","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T20:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/476607\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T20:23:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T20:23:21","slug":"blue-lights-season-three-review-the-lovable-cop-show-has-lost-its-roots-blue-lights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/476607\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue Lights season three review \u2013 the lovable cop show has lost its roots | Blue Lights"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beloved dramas create safe spaces within themselves and, for fans of BBC police saga Blue Lights<\/a>, home is the inside of the squad car driven by Stevie (Martin McCann), when he and partner Grace (Si\u00e2n Brooke) are parked up and their radios are quiet. Stevie reaching into the back seat and bringing out a plastic box full of sweet treats he has lovingly baked is a sign that all is well.<\/p>\n

The opening credits are yet to roll when we get the reassuring sight of Grace and Stevie biting through frosting. But this isn\u2019t just a moment of calm before all hell breaks loose again on their Belfast beat. At the end of season two, the \u201cwill-they-won\u2019t-they\u201d between the two main characters became a \u201cyes they definitely will\u201d, and with some time now having passed \u2013 Stevie\u2019s got a beard \u2013 the couple are browsing for houses together online.<\/p>\n

The affair might soon be over? \u2026 Si\u00e2n Brooke as Grace and Martin McCann as Stevie in Blue Lights. Photograph: BBC\/Two Cities Television<\/p>\n

Like Grace and Stevie\u2019s relationship, Blue Lights<\/a> has evolved. When it began, it was a hard-edged saga about the struggle to police a city where the Troubles are over. Lingering tensions between communities and resentment towards the police, combined with the poverty and drug problems that blight every modern British town, meant trouble flared every day. Offsetting many tense scenes, where it looked as if one of the cops had walked into a lethal ambush, was a weakness for soapy drama based on stifled longing between colleagues at the station. As viewers have got to know and like these people, the soppier character work has started to push the tough sectarian dynamics aside.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe section\u2019s like a flipping dating shop,\u201d says Stevie on one of the many shared car journeys he and Grace take so we can eavesdrop on their couple chat. \u201cIt\u2019s messy.\u201d He might have a point: with fellow \u201cpeelers\u201d Tommy (Nathan Braniff) and Aisling (Dearbh\u00e1ile McKinney) also cohabiting, not to mention Shane (Frank Blake) and Annie (Katherine Devlin) still at that tingling maybe stage, the personal might be about to eclipse the political.<\/p>\n

The comeback episode shows little sign of the uniquely Northern Irish energies that have previously made Blue Lights shine. Instead of the police having to win the trust of hostile communities where old loyalties and grudges outweigh citizens\u2019 commitment to the rule of law, the situation in Belfast could be from any crime drama. Gangsters have invented a delivery app for premium-grade cocaine, and when bobbies on the beat intercept a junior drug runner and his naive girlfriend on courier duty, the regular police have once again stood on the toes of the organised crime division.<\/p>\n

A tad worn \u2026 Andi Osho as Sandra, Dearbh\u00e1ile McKinney as Aisling and Katherine Devlin as Annie in Blue Lights. Photograph: BBC\/PA<\/p>\n

A veteran of cracking Northern Ireland\u2019s toughest gangs, \u201cColly\u201d Collins (Michael Smiley), arrives at the station to disrupt the hierarchy and rekindle some tricky personal relationships. Meanwhile, at the posh end of town, the opening of a private members\u2019 club ends prematurely when a guest uses the new coke app then overdoses in the bar \u2013 but the club\u2019s owner, Dana Morgan (Cathy Tyson), doesn\u2019t seem quite as concerned for his welfare as she should be.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s solid urban-decay fare, and the part of the story involving the kids in care swept up into serious crime lets the show put pressure on the weakness in its central relationship: while Stevie is a veteran officer who has learned to live with the police\u2019s limitations when it comes to helping desperate people, Grace is a former social worker who keeps bringing her compassionate instinct to her new job. But as the season goes on, the question of whether their relationship can survive working together is a dramatic uncertainty that\u2019s simply less fun than the old days, when we wondered when they\u2019d finally take down each other\u2019s particulars.<\/p>\n

The bad guys are slightly less thrilling, too. That this scary big boss is actually the employee of that other, scarier boss, while this other boss is someone who doesn\u2019t appear to be involved in organised crime at all, is a narrative shape that\u2019s a tad worn, as is the revelation that people involved in one sort of wrongdoing turn out to be perpetrators or victims of different, darker crimes.<\/p>\n

When Grace says to Stevie, \u201cWe should check it out,\u201d referring to a situation that we know is potentially too dangerous for two cops full of cake to tackle, the pure dread Blue Lights used to instil in us isn\u2019t there any more. We still love it, but in a way that\u2019s safe and familiar. The affair might soon be over.<\/p>\n

Blue Lights aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now in the UK. It starts on SBS on 9 October at 9.30pm in Australia, with episodes added weekly on SBS On Demand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Beloved dramas create safe spaces within themselves and, for fans of BBC police saga Blue Lights, home is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3937],"tags":[77,382,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-476607","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115323431110415870","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}