“Until the first ad break arrives to remind you that Jed Mercurio’s new police thriller is on ITV rather than the Beeb, you might as well be watching a new Line of Duty,” said Ed Cumming in The Independent. There are differences – but “only if you squint”.
Trigger Point opens with Vicky McClure “speeding through the Blackwall Tunnel as tense radio chatter and foreboding bassy music plays in the background” – yet here she is Lana Washington, not Kate Fleming, and in the bomb disposal squad, rather than AC12. She has an “easy rapport” with her partner, Joel Nutkins (Adrian Lester) – they both served in Afghanistan – and likes to use his “lucky” wire cutters.
Tension is ramped up from the off, said Christopher Stevens in the Daily Mail: I was dripping with sweat after just a few scenes, and by the end I was “lying in a puddle on the floor”. No one comes up with better twists than Mercurio, and the first episode finishes with a “shock” so eye-popping, you’ll be “leaping out of your skin”.
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The six-part crime drama is certainly “great fun”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian – “as long as you set your preposterousness levels to ‘high’“. In short order, Washington and Nutkins are “attending a call to a suspected bomb factory in a London tower block; rescuing bound women and children from within divan beds; discovering IEDs behind toilets”, and moving crowds as the bomb risk builds. It’s all a bit silly; more “CSI: Peckham or Bomby McBombface than The Wire But With Actual Wires”.
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