This article first appeared in Village magazine, October/November 2024 edition
When ScandiNoir crime drama Bron/Broen first debuted on Irish television screens a decade ago, I joked on Twitter that RTE should hook up with the BBC to make an Irish version, with a Garda and a PSNI detective forced to work together. They could even set it in a cross-border twin-town divided by a border river and connected by a small bridge. Somewhere like Pettigo/Tullyhommon or Blacklion/Belcoo.
But it was not to be. While the English and French made the Tunnel (a Sky/Canal+ co-production), and an American drama called The Bridge was set along the US/Mexican border, no one picked up on the obvious Irish parallel – at least until now.
‘Borderline’, from independent television company ShinAwil, with funding from Screen Ireland and Lionsgate Television, and streaming on Roku in the US and MGM+ in the UK and Ireland, feels exactly like a show which began when someone pitched the idea of “Bron, but Irish”.
Unfortunately, that feels like the sum total of the imagination that went into making the show The characters are wooden and underdrawn, meaning that the intricately designed crime plots are poorly served.
The foundational joke in Bron was that the two mismatched characters each fitted the stereotype held of them by the other’s nation. Danes regard Swede as cold and unemotional, so Saga Noren is initially presented as a transactional robot running on logic, while Swedes consider the Danes to be, well, schlubby guys like Martin Rohde.
There’s some lip service to this idea in ‘Borderline’, but it’s unclear whether it’s accidental or deliberate.
PSNI detective chief inspector Philip Boyd (Eoin Macken) is introduced playing a church organ (he’s religious, got it?) but while the cliched southern view of a northern Protestant would be a fire and brimstone Paisleyite, Boyd is instead a member of a milquetoast congregation coded like an Anglican church in the home counties, more Vicar of Dilby than Free Presbyterian.
Meanwhile, his Garda counterpart Aoife Regan (Amy de Bhrún) is an atheist lesbian, skipping over the traditional stereotype of the priest-ridden South in favour of the newer cliche of the liberal post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Regan’s characterisation mostly seems to consist of be angry at everyone. Angry with co-workers, angry with suspects and witnesses, the local vicar, and her elderly neighbour. Her barely sketched underlings also spend a lot of time barking at PSNI counterparts. She has a mysterious backstory, including the fact that Regan may not be her real name, having left a Dublin posting under mysterious circumstance in one of the least plausible witness protection programmes ever, performing the same job less than a hundred miles up the road, and handed a high profile position as lead investigator on a cross-border murder enquiry which has attracted media attention. Boyd, meanwhile, is the son of a murdered RUC officer, still haunted by the memory of that event, and obsessed with the man he believed did it, who lives a few miles across the border.
One of the founding cliches of the buddy-cop genre is the mismatched odd couple who learnt to work together, and sure enough in the opening scenes between Boyd and Reagan they squabble incessantly.
But the drama never takes the time to show why they should quarrel on first sight, other than that’s what happens in this kind of show. Whatever mix of bad blood, squabble or jurisdictional egos is at play is never made clear to the viewer. The two leads fight with each other because that’s what people do in this kind of show, and no other reason.
That initial scene is symptomatic of the problems with the show. The story in every aspect feels algorithmic. Sure, it has the basic form of a piece of police drama shaped content, but the suspicion is always there that someone generated these stories generated by feeding an AI algorithm with pages from the TV tropes website, outputting a tale full of well-worn cliches but with none of the warmth, humour, or characterisation which that site celebrates in good storytelling.
Granted, some of the failings come from being an Irish viewer (and in this case, someone who sat through three Garda tribunals, one involving cross-border frictions between Garda and RUC officers). Even so, the show takes a broad brush approach to Irish history and culture. The fictional border area where it takes place has an active GAA culture, for example, but the sport of choice is hurling, not football.
There is the germ of a good idea in a clash of cultures between North and South, and occasional flashes of that concept do make an appearance on the screen. But this undercooked show will need reworking and more rewrites to realise its potential if it is renewed for a second season.