In the era of full disclosure and public transparency, everyone’s image can use a little spit and polish once in a while. And in the case of London’s Metropolitan Police Service, a little PR rehab is definitely required. That’s the set-up of the UK comedy-drama, Babylon, which follows both the efforts of the police officers of the Territorial Support Group and the Armed Response Unit to maintain law and order and those of the Met’s public relations department employed to put a positive spin on events when things go pear-shaped.
Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting director Danny Boyle was keen to develop a modern take on the police procedural, one that shifted the focus away from the traditional tropes of dogged detectives or cops on the beat, and found inspiration in news stories that looked at the encroachment of surveillance culture — whether by closed-circuit cameras monitoring city streets or everyday people recording events on their phones — and uncensored blogs by police personnel.
"Most cop shows have detectives at the heart of them, which is why we don’t have any."
To further flesh out the idea, Boyle turned to the writing team of Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, best-known for the long-running cult-hit sitcom Peep Show. Bain explains, “The genre is way past the point of saturation and we wanted to do things we hadn’t seen before. Most cop shows have detectives at the heart of them, which is why we don’t have any — it’s just people above or below that band.”
So in addition to the officers to the two street-level divisions Babylon follows, the series also offers viewers something of a surrogate in the form of the Met’s new director of communications Liz Garvey (Brit Marling), an American import with new-millennium ideas about improving the relationship between the police and the public. Needless to say, she encounters more than a few snags along the way, both from irate citizens and the high-ranking bureaucrats looking to ensure they’re shielded from any blowback. “Police shows have been done a hundred thousand times, but we hadn’t really seen one that had that element of top-brass politics and PR.”
Research was a hard slog at times — Bain and Armstrong drew upon memoirs from former police commissioners, as well as actual accounts from currently-active officers who perhaps wisely chose to remain anonymous — but more challenging was striking just the right balance when it came to establishing and maintaining Babylon’s tone. After all, this is a series that pokes fun at the flaws and foibles of modern law enforcement while also featuring snipers and suicide. “Me and Jesse talk endlessly about issues around tone because comedy-drama is a very broad church,” Bain admits. “It’s a very wide spectrum and I think one of the challenges of a show like Babylon is finding that tone that works. We wanted to do a complex, sophisticated show, and for us certainly it was new territory because it was quite a lot of plates to be spinning.”
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