Criminal Record Season 2 Review: Capaldi vs Jumbo, Round Two, on Apple TV
This Criminal Record season 2 review is for everyone deciding whether to commit to another eight weeks of Peter Capaldi and Cush Jumbo glaring at each other across a London nick. The good news: Apple TV’s slow-burn corruption thriller hasn’t lost any of its bite. The first two episodes have aired in the UK, with new instalments dropping each Wednesday until the finale on 10 June. Two episodes in, this is sharper, angrier and more politically combustible than the first run, and the central pairing has lost none of its static charge.
In This Article
- Where Criminal Record season 2 picks up the story
- A political-rally murder sets the stakes
- Capaldi and Jumbo are still the engine
- The far-right plot lands close to the present
- How it stacks up against the British thriller field
- The supporting cast finally gets room to breathe
- Should you commit now, or wait for the full run?
Where Criminal Record season 2 picks up the story
The first run of Criminal Record ended with DS June Lenker (Jumbo) chipping away at DCI Daniel Hegarty’s (Capaldi) carefully maintained reputation, exposing a wrongful conviction and the institutional shrug that protected it. Season two doesn’t reset the table. Hegarty has been quietly rehabilitated into a more shadowy posting in police intelligence, Lenker has the scars of being the officer who told the truth and was punished for it, and the Met is doing what the Met does best in this show: pretending nothing happened.
Creator Paul Rutman resists the temptation to rerun the formula. Where season one was a domestic-violence 999 call that unspooled into something larger, season two starts with a public, political killing and works outwards into territory that feels uncomfortably plausible. If you’re catching up, the first season is still on Apple TV and you can binge it in a weekend; the second season’s opening scene assumes you remember roughly who hates whom and why.
A political-rally murder sets the stakes
The inciting incident is brutal and quick. A young man is stabbed to death at a political rally in central London. Within an hour the case has been hoovered up by counter-terror, the social-media autopsies have started, and the dead man’s family are watching strangers turn their son into a hashtag. Lenker catches the call. Hegarty, working a parallel intelligence operation, recognises a thread he was already pulling. They are forced back together; neither pretends to like it.
What looks at first like a hate crime quickly opens into something harder to file: a far-right cell with money behind it, a planned bomb attack on a London target, and the kind of half-radicalised young men whose digital footprints make for grim reading. The procedural beats are familiar – door-knocks, surveillance vans, a chief constable who’d rather not be told – but Rutman keeps the politics specific, not generic.
Capaldi and Jumbo are still the engine
Whatever else changes, the show still lives or dies on its two leads, and they are operating at a level very few British thrillers reach. Capaldi’s Hegarty is somehow even harder to read this time – less the cold predator of season one, more a man trying to work out whether the institution he’s spent thirty years inside is salvageable or just rotten. There’s a scene in episode two, a quiet exchange in a stairwell, that does more character work in three minutes than most shows manage in a series.
Jumbo, given more space, lets Lenker be tired without becoming defeated. She is sharper, slightly meaner, more obviously calculating about which battles are worth picking. Their Guardian review in 2024 called them mesmerising together, and that’s still true; the difference now is that they’re not just adversaries circling each other, they’re two people who’ve worked out they need each other and absolutely resent it.
The far-right plot lands close to the present
Television about radicalisation is hard to do without either sensationalising it or sanding the edges off. Criminal Record has, so far, mostly avoided both traps. The young men at the centre of the bomb plot aren’t cartoons; they’re funny, charming in flashes, and clearly being run by older, better-resourced people who know exactly which buttons to press. The script lets them be human without ever excusing them.
The choice to set the season around a political rally and an attack on a public space is going to feel pointed to UK viewers, particularly anyone who has watched the last couple of years of British public life. Criminal Record isn’t trying to be subtle about that. It is, however, trying to be careful: the show is more interested in the architecture of how a plot like this gets built than in the bang at the end of it. There are moments when it tips into lecture, but they’re rare and short.
How it stacks up against the British thriller field
British thriller TV is having a strong year, which makes the comparison harder than it would have been twelve months ago. Adolescence rewrote what a four-part Netflix drama can do, A Thousand Blows proved Steven Knight still has a Victorian gear nobody else does, and Richard Gadd’s Half Man is currently chewing through BBC iPlayer with the kind of bruising precision that makes everything around it look polite. Our Half Man review covered why that one matters.
Against that field, Criminal Record is doing something a little less flashy but, two episodes in, no less ambitious. It is a procedural that takes its procedural duties seriously – paperwork, jurisdictional fights, the boring grind of how investigations actually move – while still working as character drama. If you’ve already worked your way through our best BBC iPlayer dramas of 2026 rundown and want something with a slightly colder, more institutional edge, this is the one to add. It’s also a strong contender for next year’s awards conversation; this year’s BAFTA TV predictions already have a crowded drama category, and Capaldi’s performance here is going to make next year’s even worse.
The supporting cast finally gets room to breathe
One of the quieter improvements this season is that the supporting bench is properly used. Dustin Demri-Burns is excellent as a counter-terror officer who doesn’t quite trust either lead. Luke Pasqualino brings a low, watchful menace to a role I won’t spoil. Lyndsey Marshall and Peter Sullivan, both reliable ensemble players, get scenes that aren’t just exposition delivery. The first run leaned heavily on Capaldi-Jumbo two-handers; the new season trusts its world enough to spend time away from them, and is better for it.
The London the show puts on screen is also more textured this time. Less of the glossy night-shot cityscape, more car parks behind community centres, fluorescent-lit briefing rooms, and the kind of suburban high streets where most actual policing happens. It looks less like a Netflix thriller and more like the country we live in, which is a compliment.
Should you commit now, or wait for the full run?
The honest answer: it depends on how you watch television. If you like to go in cold and binge a season in two weekends, wait until early June and start fresh – the weekly drip is going to be agonising on this one, and the episode-two cliffhanger is the kind of thing that makes you regret being a sensible adult with a job. If you genuinely enjoy a weekly conversation about a show, this is one of the more rewarding ones currently airing; the gap between episodes lets you sit with the ambiguities rather than rush past them.
What you should not do is dismiss this as Apple TV’s quieter sibling to its splashier dramas. Apple’s official announcement for the new run made a lot of noise about the show’s first-season reception, and on the strength of episodes one and two it earns the boast. Two episodes in, this is the most adult, most politically alert British police drama on a streamer right now.
A confident, slightly furious second season of a show that already knew what it was. Capaldi and Jumbo are doing some of the best television acting in the UK at the moment, the writing has a clearer political target than season one, and the supporting cast has finally been given enough oxygen to matter. The only real risk is the landing – eight episodes is a long runway and the bomb-plot premise could collapse into thriller cliche if the writers blink. Two episodes in, there’s no sign of a blink.
Are you sticking with the weekly drop, or holding out until the full series is on Apple TV in June so you can mainline it in one go?
Two episodes in and I’m already more invested than I was for most of S1 – Capaldi has clearly decided to actually have fun this time round and Jumbo just needs to be on every British thing for the next decade. The Met case angle has more legs than I expected. Mild gripe though: the night-scene grading is somehow even darker than season one, watched ep 2 with the lights on and still missed half the close-ups. Anyone else having to crank the brightness, or is it just my telly?
Agreed on the grading – watched ep 1 on a sunny Saturday afternoon and could barely tell which character was in which scene. Lovely TV-cinema-grading flex but it’s a streaming show, half the audience is watching on a phone on the bus. Capaldi looks proper unleashed though, hadn’t realised how much I’d missed his energy.