Series 2 of DI Ray takes a most interesting slant on things, really toying with our own prejudices and expectations as much as the characters’
“Crime really does pay”
I enjoyed the first season of DI Ray, creator and writer Maya Sondhi finding a point of difference for her police procedural, refracting the crime drama through the prism of institutional racism as experienced by Parminder Nagra’s DI Rachita Ray, based in the fictional Birmingham police force of West Central, but also through the challenging realities of being an Asian British person in this day and age.
Things haven’t gotten any easier in Series 2, expanded to six episodes this time around, and making every single one of them count. Hauled in front of her superiors after her reinstatement following the events of the Series 1 finale, she’s forced to endure the barely-veiled racism of Ian Puleston-Davies’s wickedly retrograde Supt Beardsmore who isn’t keen on her return, though she does seem to have Gemma Whelan’s DCI Henderson on her side.
And just as she’s got her feet under the desk again, with a slightly different looking team, then a massive case hits. A drive-by shooting outside a hospital has claimed the life of a nurse and also Frank Chapman, the head of a notorious crime family. With rivals the Mochanis muscling in from Leicester, the fear is that all-out gang warfare could be on the cards as reprisal kidnappings and murders up the ante considerably.
It’s a grimly compelling set of episodes, a lot of violence being meted out in the name of faaamily, and Sondhi’s writing rarely takes its foot off the pedal to allow breathing room from all that grimness. From suspected moles in the team to racist WhatsApp groups, life in the station is tough and Nagra astutely shows us all of Ray’s determination to do everything on her own terms, even if it means regularly defying orders and putting several lives in danger.
There’s cleverness in the way the case rolls out too – shuttling from murder to child exploitation, people trafficking to corrupt local government officials, nodding back to untrustworthy ex-husbands for an added bonus – and I loved the way the ending confounded pretty much everyone. In a show unafraid to be grimly realistic and rightly unrelenting about racism – from overt action to insidious micro-aggressions – the tweak in the tail here feels just right.
