Why the UK Show ‘Trigger Point’ Should Be Your Late-Summer Binge

We need shows like this. I’m all for subtlety, fine writing, immaculate TV vibes—I’m watching Industry like everyone else—but I also need straight-up nonsense. In fact, I require it at the tail end of summer, when fall is at the door and the demands of the serious season loom.

So let me recommend UK’s wonderfully silly, ruthlessly tense bomb-squad police drama Trigger Point, which is about to release its second season here in the US and will not tax your brain, nor release you from its grip. Season 1, from 2022, is available now (on Peacock and BritBox—six episodes), so you can bone up this very Labor Day weekend, ahead of the excellent second season dropping on BritBox on Thursday, September 5.

A highly specific anglophilia is required. Remember The Bodyguard? Did you watch Luther? The Shadow Line? Line of Duty? Slow Horses? Criminal Report? Trigger Point is like all of those, but louder and much more blunt-force. This is a compliment, of course, and also an opportunity to herald the uncommon talents of its 41-year-old star, Vicky McClure—an actor known in the UK but not much at all here—who plays Lana Washington, the troubled but preternaturally skilled explosives officer, and achieves a mix of broken vulnerability and hardened badassery the likes of which we’ve just about never seen on American TV. Imagine Carrie Mathison mixed with Lara Croft mixed with Gina Carano and you get sort of close.

Oh, and add Jack Bauer. The real analog for Trigger Point, which is shameless in its cliffhangers, its domestic terrorist baddies, its will-she-defuse-the-bomb-in-time sequences, is that paragon of TV tension, 24. After Kiefer Sutherland’s iconic action-drama ran its course back in the ’00s, TV got real prestige-y, and while one wouldn’t want to return to the George W. Bush era (24 has not aged well), it sure is nice to have something similarly dumb and fun to fire up on the small screen.

OK, here’s the set-up: Inside London’s Metropolitan Police exists a squad of bomb-disposal experts, mostly veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq who know their way around IEDs. Washington is their leader: no-nonsense, working-class, and repelled by the careerist detectives she works with—except her ex, DI Thom Youngblood, played by Mark Stanley, who she’s still secretly in love with. And there is a shadowy band of very online, meme-adept hacker-terrorists who have a whiff of Antifa about them and keep planting elaborate bombs around London, determined to disrupt the capitalist system. Oh, and Washington’s mom is off her rocker after a tragic loss in Season 1, and her boss, Commander John Francis (Julian Ovenden), does not have Washington’s best interests at heart.