What a rare pleasure it is to watch a drama like this that can’t be pigeonholed within the first five minutes. Straight away we’re enjoying Pierre for its canny script and deft characterisation, but what is this Channel 4 show? David Harewood plays… a detective? No, Pierre is arriving to work at a police station because he’s the duty solicitor, at first dealing with the light comic relief of a chronic shoplifter who claims God told her to steal, and then with the more difficult issue of a young Black man accused of car theft by a white officer.
He goes home, to a patient wife and taciturn teenaged son who has just dropped out of university; he calls in at his firm’s dingy above-a-shop office, with a bag full of fresh mousetraps and a list of excuses about why he’s undercharging his clients. At night, he visits establishments where you won’t get in if the doorman doesn’t know you. His doctor keeps calling him, urging him to make that appointment. New cases keep coming in.
Pierre has got a lot on. Too much. He worries about things, and tries to make them right when that’s not always possible. He’s cheerful but world-weary, smart but stuck in what looks like west London’s outer zones. Several squalls of middle age are threatening to combine into a storm.
Where is he going? We needn’t rush to worry about it, since Harewood treats us to a finely underplayed turn in the lead, and series creators John Donnelly and Roy Williams have fashioned such an enviably rich world in an unglamorous setting. Time spent with Pierre’s best mate, copper Ronnie (Jason Flemyng), over a kebab or a fry-up – although Pierre needs to stop eating them! – is a window into decades of happiness, disappointment and laughter, all fraternally shared. Time spent at home suggests Pierre’s wife Celeste (Sara Powell) is someone he should lean on and listen to more, while his son Eli (Dylan Ennis) is not the cartoon slacker he initially appears to be.
At times, it’s all dangerously close to the classic dialogue trap of making everyone a kind, witty stand-in for the writer’s own benevolent cleverness, but it’s too well-crafted to fall in. Pierre is just a man who hangs out with cool people with sharply honed senses of self-deprecating humour, another one being the manager of the firm he works for, Charlotte (Michele Austin). “OK, meeting over!” she says after a morning conference where her team makes plans to do not very much. “Let’s all pretend we’re diligent and serious people!”
Something more serious is clearly there by the end of episode 1: the Black kid’s allegation of police racism ends up giving Pierre a more urgent quest than the cases of the week where he gets to the bottom of a break-in at a dry cleaner’s, or finds out what really happened when a teenager was cautioned by the police for handling drugs at her house party.
Yet, as Pierre and the show confront how his middle-class suburban existence is not at all the same life as a white contemporary would live, those bread-and-butter jobs don’t let up. Pierre still needs to look after his family, his friends, himself and all the other things he can never properly get around to or make better.
While it’s not anything like as dark or intense, this drama is slightly reminiscent of Martin Freeman’s BBC drama The Responder in the way it follows one flawed man around an urban setting peopled by vivid characters whom we see through the protagonist’s gaze, and who are familiar types made fresh by the crispness and subtlety with which they’re drawn.
It’s another show, too, where the brilliance of the lead performance and a sneaky twist in the format means you forget you’re basically watching yet another crime drama. That genre is so often flat and lifeless; in Pierre it has colour and depth.
Pierre premieres on 5 October on Channel 4.
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