LINE OF DUTY. BBC-2, five 60-minute episodes, 26 June to 24 July 2012. Lennie James, Martin Compston, Vicky McClure, Neil Morrissey, Craig Parkinson, Gina McKee, Kate Ashfield. Screenwriter: Jed Mercurio. Directors: Douglas Mackinnon & David Caffrey.

   Lennie James plays DCI Tony Gates in this first series of a well-written police procedural drama produced by BBC Two in England. Gates is a highly decorated and widely admired police officer, a black bespectacled man, almost professorial in nature, happily married with two young daughters whom he adores. He has his place in the sun, and yet.

   As in all good noir dramas, for that is exactly what this is, what goes wrong? Firstly, Gates is having an affair with a former lover, who (we learn later) once jilted him but has come back into his life, with a vengeance. But secondly, what it isattracts the attention of AC-12, the British anti-corruption unit that’s the equivalent of Internal Affairs in the US, is merely a free sandwich at a lunch counter.

   From this small beginning, things escalate faster than Gates can control them. His extramarital lover asks him to cover up a hit-and-run accident she has had. A dog, she says at first, but Gates soon learns that it was her accountant who is dead. AC-12 also suspects that Gates’s success is due to “laddering,” which means he has been adding charges to criminals already in custody, thereby boosting his conviction numbers.

   Hot on Gates’s trail from the outside is DS Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) while working undercover at the same time from the inside is DC Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), and soon the previously unshakeable Gates has fewer and fewer options, especially once it is learned that his lover had made some bad enemies, enemies who begin targeting Gates as well.

   There are lots of twists and turns in the plot before the five episodes are finished, with biggest surprises coming (not surprisingly) almost every time the 60 minutes allotted per episodes are up. One might think that DS Arnott, as the leading protagonist, would be the one the viewer is meant to side up with, but the young bantam-sized and policeman, newly transferred from an anti-terrorist squad which made a terrible mistake in a recent would-be raid, besides his obsession to bring down Gates, has issues of his own to work through, .

   It is Gates, really, whose fate is slowly twisting in the wind, who is the more fascinating, and yes, sympathetic character. The story has several layers, all of which are very well developed. It is difficult to not start the next episode in recently released set of DVDs as soon as the previous one has finished.

   The police work as shown seems real. Policemen need approval from superiors at each step of the way — there is little room for mavericks to go out on their own — paperwork is always there to be done, and risk assessment and the cost of overtime always have to be considered.

   But it’s the story of good versus evil, and the people who are caught up in it on a daily basis, that makes this series a success, and when it gets personal, as it does in also every minute of this 300 minute production, so much the better.