2003 - 2007
Five series. BBC One. 2003 to 2007. Twenty-three episodes of a British police drama that starts as a case-of-the-week undercover procedural and ends as something much harder to watch.
Murphy's Law follows DS Tommy Murphy, a Belfast-born undercover officer working for the Metropolitan Police in London. Murphy is not a functioning adult. He is a man who failed his psychiatric assessment before series one even begins and who gets one last chance from a boss who should have signed him off. That is the premise and it is also the whole show in miniature. Every assignment he takes on pushes him further into territory a stable person would never survive, and the question the series keeps asking is how much more he can absorb before there is nothing of him left.
The role was written for James Nesbitt by Northern Irish novelist Colin Bateman, who had already built a career on the Dan Starkey thrillers and the film adaptation of Divorcing Jack. Bateman wanted a vehicle that could take Nesbitt away from the charming-everyman register of Cold Feet and hand him something with real weight. He delivered.
It began life as a one-off BBC Northern Ireland TV film in 2001 before BBC One picked it up as an ongoing series two years later. That origin matters. The pilot already had the ingredients. The five-series run is what pulled them apart and tested them at length.
Nesbitt is the reason you watch. He plays Murphy as a man running on grief and gallows humour, and the performance is the full reason the show works. Charm and damage in the same sentence, sometimes the same word. The Belfast accent stays and the pain stays with it.
The supporting cast turns over across the run, which is partly a creative choice and partly how the show evolves. Early series keep a tighter ensemble. Later series rebuild around whatever long-form investigation is carrying the season.
Key supporting players across the run:
Series three features an early television role for Michael Fassbender as Caz Miller, a psychotic lieutenant to a crime boss, three years before put him on everyone's radar. If you are watching for the first time now, that is a genuinely fun piece of casting archaeology.
Claudia Harrison
DI Annie Guthrie
Gerard McSorley
Supporting cast
Colin Bateman
Creator / Writer
James Nesbitt
DS Tommy Murphy
Mark Womack
Supporting cast
Del Synnott
DC Alan Carter
Nicholas Pinnock
Guest cast
Michael Fassbender
Caz Miller
Underneath the undercover-of-the-week scaffolding, Murphy's Law is a study of a man who cannot stop punishing himself. Murphy carries a loss he refuses to put down. Each assignment is a form of self-harm dressed up as professional competence. He is useful to the Met precisely because he has nothing left to lose, which is also the reason he should not be on the job at all.
Bateman's scripts are interested in the gap between the Tommy Murphy who jokes his way into a prison cell or a gangster's drawing room and the Tommy Murphy who goes home to an empty flat afterwards. The two are the same man. Neither is a performance. That is what gives the writing its particular bite.
The Irish-in-London dimension is load-bearing, not decorative. Murphy is an outsider in the Met. His accent, his history, and his instincts are all from somewhere else. The Troubles sit in his past rather than his present, but the residue colours how he reads a room and who he trusts. The title itself is a wry double-meaning. Murphy is the man, and Murphy's Law is also the idiom about everything going wrong that can possibly go wrong. Bateman knew exactly what he was doing there.
"Nesbitt is a law unto himself," wrote The Guardian of series three, which also earned "Terrific" and "Tense and gripping" from the British press when the show hit its peak.
Series one and two are structured as standalone cases across four or five episodes each. Series three onwards commit to a single long-form story per season. Series three puts Murphy inside a prison. The fourth builds its arc around a bank heist crew, and the fifth drops him into a kidnap plot. That shift from anthology to long-form is the reason the show got good. The case-of-the-week format let Nesbitt cycle through guises. The longer form let him stay inside one guise until the seams started to show.
The look is grey and grainy. The camera goes handheld when it needs to. Edmund Butt's score knows when to step back. Directors including Colm McCarthy and Brian Kirk (both of whom would go on to bigger prestige work) treat it as a character piece first and a procedural second.
Critical response sharpened as the show sharpened. Series one landed fine. Series three was when British critics sat up and started comparing it to the more ambitious American crime writing of the period. The tonal shift was deliberate. Nesbitt pushed for darker material and got it.
The show ended in 2007 with no sixth series. Nesbitt himself has said the decision came down to scheduling rather than quality, series five having been counter-programmed against ITV's Doc Martin and losing the ratings fight. That is a genuinely galling way for a show this good to end.
Since then, Murphy's Law has been gradually rediscovered. It keeps getting written up as the best British undercover drama you have never seen, which it more or less is. Nesbitt's turn here is at least as good as anything he has done since, including the work that finally put him back on the prestige map via MobLand.
It works because the central performance is the genuine article and the writing refuses to flinch from what it is doing to him. I came to Murphy's Law after Luther, expecting a smaller sibling, and found something with more interior life and less theatre. Luther shouts. Murphy absorbs.
If you want the British precedent for the damaged-cop-on-the-edge subgenre, it is here. If you want to watch a novelist with a clear idea of a character, handed to an actor who fully understands it, you will not do better in the 2000s. Five series and 23 episodes. Inside them, a television performance as good as any in the decade, largely because Nesbitt refuses to protect himself.
A forgotten gem, and one worth actually remembering.
Antony Sher
Guest cast
Owen Teale
DS Paul Allison
Liam Cunningham
Guest cast
Mark Benton
Father McBride