Tracy Ifeachor (Quantico), James Frain (Star Trek: Discovery) and Sharon D Clarke (Rocks) have been cast, as well as Celine Buckens (Bridgerton), Kerr Logan (Game of Thrones), Lolita Chakrabarti (Vigil) and RTS Award-winner Sinéad Keenan (Little Boy Blue).
Everything is cryptic; minor characters from three series ago suddenly pop up on screen; and half of the dialogue is in acronyms. Yet viewers still can’t get enough of Jed Mercurio’s perplexing police procedural.
The series delights in plunging viewers into the darkness as they fumble to their own (often wrong) conclusions. Luckily for us, BBC Sounds’ companion podcast Obsessed with… Line of Duty is on hand to offer illumination.
The announcement via Twitter teased the bumper upcoming series, with Martin Compston’s character DS Steve Arnott asking his gaffer, Superintendent Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar), for an extra episode.
The seventies-set international crime thriller The Serpent follows the true story of global efforts to capture Interpol’s most wanted man, the murderer Charles Sobhraj (Tahar Rahim, A Prophet).
Filming for the new series started up again in September and is still ongoing, with Adrian Dunbar, Vicky McClure and Martin Compston reprising their roles as detectives Superintendent Ted Hastings, DI Kate Fleming and DS Steve Arnott.
AC-12, the anti-corruption unit, will be met with a new, inscrutable adversary called DCI Joanne Davidson, played by Kelly Macdonald (Giri/Haji),
The series will pick up a year and a half after the closure of Operation Pear Tree, with Hastings returning to head up the unit after his exoneration at the end of series five.
Line of Duty creator Jed Mercurio decided he probably should learn to write – after he’d already penned a hit BBC drama series. “I did it backwards,” the former medic told the RTS Midlands Careers Fair 2020.
Mercurio had been a junior doctor working in Birmingham hospitals when he replied to an advert in the British Medical Journal. It had been placed by a production company looking for drama ideas.
The Line of Duty big guns Ted Hastings, Kate Fleming and Steve Arnott will pause hunting down bent coppers to become experienced channel hoppers, with co-stars Adrian Dunbar, Vicky McClure and Martin Compston joining the show.
Adrian Dunbar commented: “It’s an honour to be part of the esteemed Gogglebox line up especially when it’s raising money for the phenomenal work Stand Up To Cancer do.”
Watch Jed Mercurio in conversation with William Gallagher as he talks about the upcoming series of Line of Duty, adapting on set to the pandemic, and shares his advice on how to write drama for TV.
Line of Duty has become a national institution, with series six still to come.
In a whole new spin on the police procedural, Line of Duty puts the coppers themselves under the microscope, as the series follows the anti-corruption investigations of AC Unit 12.
Set in contemporary London, the six-part series portrays the death-defying and life-saving work of the Metropolitan Police Bomb Disposal Squad, also known as “Expo”.
A summer terrorist campaign wreaks havoc on the capital, and it’s up to Expo to defuse a series of improvised explosive devices.
Vicky McClure (Line of Duty) plays the experienced but reckless operative Lana Washington. As Lana begins to suspect her unit is the bomber’s true target, she sets out on a desperate search for proof and the bomber’s identity.
