Blue Lights season 4 cements BBC drama’s status as most thrilling series on TV

When people talk about the pantheon of great BBC dramas from the last 10 years, Line of Duty, Luther and Peaky Blinders spring to mind. Blue Lights should be added to that list.

The fourth series premiered this week and, while episodes are airing weekly, people are tearing through them all on iPlayer – and it’s currently one of the best shows on TV.

Blue Lights, which premiered in 2023, stars Siân Brooke, Katherine Devlin and Nathan Braniff as three probationary officers in a Belfast police department. The drama was co-created by Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson.

Since it started, the show has become one of the most dependable hits for the BBC, averaging seven million viewers per episode – and becoming the second most-watched programme in Northern Ireland, where it’s filmed.

It’s easy to see why the show has become a hit – it spends time on carving out the personalities behind the uniforms, which makes the consistently murky situations they find themselves in more thrilling to witness. The penultimate episode of series three, in particular, culminated in an unbearably tense denouement that was as good as anything on screens last year.

Series four is just as gripping. Grace (Brooke), Stevie (Martin McCann) and the team are tasked with diffusing tensions as a right-wing group protests a local multicultural community centre. When an unknown cluster of masked individuals suddenly attack the event, the police are left to deal with the consequences for everyone in the area.

Lawn and Patterson have praised the BBC’s commitment to the show when it was renewed last year, stating: “From the beginning, we wanted to write a show that had scale and ambition in its storytelling, and this decision gives us everything we need to do that.”

In an interview with The Independent, series star Brooke explained why she signed onto the project.

“I just fell in love with the writing,” she said. “It was so clever and accessible. You often assume people in uniform know exactly what they’re doing, that this couldn’t possibly be their first day on the job.

“Because Blue Lights is centred around three rookies, audiences go on the journey with them rather than feel removed from it.”

The future of Blue Lights is uncertain amid budget cuts at the BBC; the corporation is cutting some longstanding shows in a bid to make £500m in savings over the next two years.

Last month, the broadcaster confirmed that Celebrity Mastermind, the Blankety Blank revival and Live at the Apollo have all been put to rest. The latter has been a BBC mainstay for 22 years.

“We are incredibly proud of all three of these much-loved shows and would like to thank everyone involved, both in front of and behind the camera, for bringing them to screen and making them such a success over many years,” the BBC said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, we have to make some really tough choices in light of our funding challenges, and these savings have been identified from the entertainment genre.”

The BBC has come under pressure to make significant cuts in recent years, with the broadcaster reporting that its income from the £180 annual licence fee has fallen by a quarter over the past decade. In March, the corporation warned that its current funding model was “not sustainable and needs reform”, committing to exploring options around reforming the licence fee.

Last month, the BBC’s director-general Matt Brittin announced his intention for up to 2,000 jobs to be axed in a cost savings plan, with 550 of those jobs taken from BBC News, and TV and radio-related roles.

It was also confirmed that six shows would be cancelled on BBC Radio 4 – The World Tonight, The Midnight News, Money Box Live, AntiSocial, The Law Show, and Crossing Continents – and that BBC One will no longer broadcast a Sunday morning edition of BBC Breakfast.

The Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 will also have a roster of four permanent presenters, rather than the existing five. Meanwhile, only one anchor will present the format on Saturday.