Jed Mercurio, the writer of Line of Duty, is a medical doctor who came to writing for television after answering an advert in the British Medical Journal. The series that resulted, Cardiac Arrest (1994-96) was about the NHS, and was initially treated as being either a tell-all or blatant propaganda, depending on your political persuasion.
So it was not immediately obvious that Mercurio’s main interest in his writing is how systems clash; and how any system, no matter how well-intentioned or conceived, will fail because it has people in it. Line of Duty, about a police anti-corruption unit and thus bound to ask “Who will guard the guards themselves?” was always going to be Mercurio’s magnum opus.
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