Because Netflix thinks content should be delivered like water through a firehose, as opposed to a steady drip, staying up-to-date with all of the services' various offerings is a challenge second only to actually watching them and maintaining some semblance of a personal life. Case in point: Netflix delivered unto its subscribers three high-profile series last week, Jessica Jones, Love, and Collateral. While the release of a Marvel Netflix series and the final season of one of television's most enjoyable romantic comedies in a long time is sure to get people bingeing, Collateral should not be overlooked. Not only is the UK import binge-worthy, but given the talent involved, the first-rate execution of the material, and the fact that it clocks in with a brisk runtime, the series is a welcome change of pace from shows that try to stretch 90 minutes of story into 13 hours of television.The series is more than just a competent and compelling procedural. Collateral is also filled with strong ideas positioned front and center. Hailing from writer David Hare (The Hours, The Reader) and with each episode directed by SJ Clarkson, who has directed episodes of, oddly enough, Jessica Jones and Marvel's The Defenders, the series is a post-Brexit thriller about broken systems and the systemic abuse prevalent in many institutions. But the series is also a solid police procedural with a whip-smart lead in Mulligan's DI Kip Glaspie, who is tasked with investigating the seemingly random murder of a immigrant pizza deliveryman when every clue points to it being a far more systematic act of violence.Related: Love Season 3 Review: Netflix's Modern Romance Delivers A Satisfying Final SeasonWhat unfolds, then, is part thriller, part procedural, and part political commentary, all wrapped in a smartly written package and adorned with fully realized characters and strong performances.

Carey Mulligan Turns Self-Awareness Into A Superpower

Carey Mulligan and Nathaniel Martello-White Collateral Netflix

As a pregnant, ultra-competent cop, Kip Glaspie is bound to elicit comparisons to a certain Minnesota police chief. And just like Marge Gunderson in Fargo, Kip's pregnancy is remanded mostly to the periphery of the story. Like her background as an athlete ” more specifically, a pole vaulter whose legacy is an embarrassing and painful video that lives on forever on the internet ” Kip's status as a mother-to-be is another way Collateral illustrates its approach to the complexities and multitudes of not only its central story, but also the individuals orbiting that center.

As written by Hare and performed by Mulligan, Kip is an extremely self-aware character; so much so that she seems at times to be fully aware she's a character in a cop show. Hare and Mulligan aren't trying to be arch or meta with Kip's self-awareness, but rather that quality underlines her skill as an investigator and marks her ability to anticipate when she's veering toward police clichés, making it possible to then steer out of the skid by thinking differently from those around her.

That skill is put to clever use when Kip is berated by her boss, DSU Jack Haley (Ben Miles), for overstepping her bounds with regard to a justifiably tight-lipped Iraqi immigrant. It's a familiar scene in police dramas: The cop bends or breaks the rules in an effort to solve the case and is given a verbal lashing by her superior. With Mulligan in the driver's seat, however, the scene plays out as though Kip is on the verge of looking directly into the camera and saying, œCan you believe this guy? It takes real skill to take a performance to the edge of winking at the audience without actually doing so and still maintain a level of intensity and sincerity needed to keep the police story from plunging into caricature.

Not Your Average Murder Mystery

Billie Piper in Collatera Netflix

Collateral begins with the murder of a young refugee while he's delivering a pizza from maybe the sketchiest pizza joint in all of London. Soon, it's discovered the crime, the victim, the perpetrator, and all the various individuals swept up in the crime's aftermath are not as they seem, transforming the series' central mystery from a whodunnit to a less conventional and more expansive whydunnit, one that repeatedly narrows its scope to explore various failures of institutions and systems.

In the midst of all that, Hare works with certain conventions of the police procedural in ways that are both familiar and unexpected. One of the most interesting is the choice to not only reveal the killer's identity in the first episode, but to expand the storyline so that the point of view of the perpetrator becomes one of several threads integral to the story. In essence, the inciting incident kicks off a number of storylines that include Billie Piper as a drug-addled single mother who's connected to John Simm's embattled Labor MP, as well as Nicola Walker as a lesbian vicar living with Kae Alexander's character, young Vietnamese student living in the country illegally, and who is also a potential witness to the central murder.

Because the killer is revealed so early, Collateral is expands well beyond the central investigation and all the typical trappings of your average murder mystery. The result affords the series the freedom to explore its characters' beliefs, and predicaments, as they pertain to the ideas of institutional shortcomings, racial discrimination, sexual assault, and more. Hare has written Collateral in such a way that the series essentially becomes a vehicle for the examination of those ideas, one that's camouflaged itself as a by-the-numbers police procedural.

John Simms in Collateral Netflix

Short and To The Point

It isn't news to hear there's too much TV nowadays. And with so much television being delivered in 10, 12, or 13-hour chunks, it's refreshing to see that Collateral clocks in at a far more reasonable and digestible 4 hours. That means you can binge the show in a single sitting, if you're so inclined, without wasting an entire day. Sure, most people will probably use that time to binge yet another series, but it's nice to know Collateral leaves the door open for you to make that choice.

Beyond reducing the chance of muscle atrophy, the series' runtime is simply a sign of good, economical storytelling. Even with its many digressions pointing to the larger discussion the series is interested in having, Collateral manages to stay on task. A lot of that has o do with Hare's eschewing of tired cop clichés and avoiding the awkward heaviness of similarly charged, would-be prestige dramas. Kip is good at her job and determined to see the case through to the end; she doesn't waste time pondering whether or not she's a good person. Even though the story threatens to drift into extraneous waters, there's an urgency to the storytelling that keeps the goings-on moored closely to the central narrative.

In a time when dramas, especially crime dramas, place an exaggerated value on solemnity and an oppressive sense of heaviness as evidence of their importance (see: Hulu's Hard Sun), Collateral brings gravitas to its narrative by confronting its ideas with alacrity. Being short and to the point is perhaps the series' greatest attribute.

There's Energy in the Writing

Ahd and Nathaniel Martello-White

Aside from Mulligan's terrific performance and the expediency in which the story is told, Collateral distinguishes itself primarily through Hare's scripts. The series feels very written. It's akin to watching a film or television show from Aaron Sorkin. That's not to say Collateral apes the particular cadence of Sorkin's dialogue, but rather that, when you're watching The West Wing, The Social Network, Moneyball, or The Newsroom you're keenly aware the writerly nature of the dialogue. It's rhythmic and charged and does not in anyway resemble the kind of conversation a normal human being would ever have. But that heightened quality affords the project a unique tenor, allows it to operate on a different frequency that makes it stand out.

Hare's work here is very much the same. Not only is Kip whip-smart and prone to delivering cutting remarks as though she knew exactly what the person opposite her was going to say before they did, the story is moves in, out, and around discussions on Brexit, immigration, the War on Terror, political divisions, and the systemic challenges faced by women in the workplace ” especially previously male-dominated professions like the military or law enforcement ” but it does so without missing a beat when it comes to progressing the story toward a resolution of the crime that served as the series' inciting incident.

In the wrong hands, this sort of writing runs the risk of coming off stilted and too performative, but Collateral's cast manages to make it feel of a piece with the story being told, turning the theatricality of it into a feature, not a bug. It all ultimately adds up to a well-told story with plenty of ideas that go well beyond the typical police procedural.

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Collateral is currently streaming on Netflix.