So Cuffs, BBC One’s cop drama set in Brighton, will not be renewed for a second season.
The official line (as always) is that the BBC are “proud” of the show, but they are seeking to make way for new programmes. It’ll be interesting to see what the next attempt to fill the mid-week early-evening slot vacated by Waterloo Road is, and why the BBC didn’t feel able to hold its nerve for the renewal of a programme which, while flawed, certainly had promise.
One of the major problems with Cuffs was that in the age of streaming box sets and Noir sagas, it came across as surprisingly old fashioned. Comparisons to The Bill – itself an excellent cop drama during its heydey – weren’t exactly flattering when Cuffs was launching a whole five years after The Bill was axed as a relic of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
We have become increasingly demanding of our story arcs and character developments, and Cuffs did not always punch above its weight in presenting complicated and nuanced characters.
Occasionally, the programme lucked out on sheer talent or charisma – individual performances rose above such restrictions: of particular note were Amanda Abbington’s DS Jo Moffat, Eleanor Matsuura’s Donna Prager, and Shaun Dooley’s Carl Hawkins, all of whom were doing smart, clever things in their performances that elevated the scenes they appeared in, doing great work with dialogue that was frankly broader than they deserved.
Narratively, the most frustrating thing in each episode was that many storylines (from whatever week’s guest villains and victims rota) were often not resolved. It was difficult to get a handle on what the show was trying to be – detailed police procedural with ‘grown-up’ storylines or a broader seaside postcard ‘case of the week’ drama.
While our entry point into the series was the relationship between two young coppers (Ashley Walters and Jacob Ifan), the programme was always uncertain on whose storyline was most compelling – either that, or each episode suffered when the remainder of the cast had to get a roughly equal amount of screen time.
In the end, this wasn’t appointment TV – and neither was it comfort viewing. This latter has a lot to do with the fact that it wasn’t as familiar or as established as the likes of Casualty (something we’ll discuss in a moment), but it meant that any minor irritants with the series became an excuse to switch off.
Many of the problems within the scripts smack of having to deliver to a BBC remit that was simultaneously too narrow and too broad. Like nearly every show in its first run, Cuffs had the inescapable feel of a programme unapologetically trying to find its feet.
While it can successfully be argued that audiences don’t have the attention span for that kind of world-building anymore, it seems likely that a second season would have either culled the main cast in order to develop individual characters’ storylines with more nuance, or at the very least been more inventive with flipping between storylines, and concentrating on a single character per episode, Jimmy McGovern style.
By far, the biggest missed opportunity with Cuffs not returning is that Brighton very likely won’t be used for another television series for a while. It’s a pity, since it’s a city that has many unique and instantly recognisable locations that translate well for a wide audience who don’t live there themselves. (Those viewers that do live in Brighton and Hove may have spent their time complaining that one location was improbably close to another.)
Ultimately, however the show didn’t even exploit this: far too many of the exterior scenes were filmed in backstreet locations that were certainly not iconic, and will have been unfamiliar to all but the most dedicated locals.
In short, Cuffs didn’t (quite) deserve to be cancelled: while it was by no means the sharpest officer on the beat (have a look at our occasional reviews to get a sense of the mildly frustrated we-want-to-like-it-more vibe of our reaction), it certainly wasn’t a terrible piece of television.
We’d pitch it as being about the same level of Waterloo Road, which Cuffs ostensibly replaced. The show was getting over three million viewers by the end (a pretty respectable figure these days), and there was certainly a sense that these eight episodes were about bedding certain characters down before exploring them more in future seasons.
There’s possibly a clue in that the BBC have also surrendered the rights to show Formula One, and that ITV have taken on The Voice. The argument regarding the future of the BBC licence fee rumbles on, and it will be interesting to see how the major programme makers position themselves in the Netflix era.
ITV has just proved that it doesn’t have to go lowbrow for audience grabbing event television, and as the BBC struggles to clamp down on an identity for the next ten years, programmes that are both undemanding and unashamedly populist may be the ones that get put on parole.
What did you think of Cuffs? Let us know below…