Protection review – Siobhan Finneran fires on all cylinders in this tasty crime drama

The Guardian

16-03-2025

Always and forever when I see Siobhan Finneran on screen I am catapulted back nearly 40 years to her mardy teen outrage in the 1987 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too as she objects to Sue always going first when they are out shagging Bob in his car on the moors. 'It's not so good, t'second time!' It's the funniest, bleakest thing you'll ever see.
Finneran has worked consistently ever since, but in recent years she has really come into her kingdom as a brilliant character actor – the woman you go to when you need someone to play a marrow-deep weariness with the world. Most notably this has been employed by Sally Wainwright in Happy Valley, in which Finneran played Sgt Catherine Cawood's struggling, vulnerable, recovering/lapsing addict sister, Clare, smashing Catherine's and viewers' hearts into pieces at several points along the way, before we all gamely picked ourselves up and carried on, as Finneran's characters tend to do.
Now, for the first time, she is in the lead role of a television drama – DI Liz Nyles in Protection, a six-part thriller written by Kris Mrksa, about a family living under the witness protection scheme (about 3,000 people in the UK do at any one time, according to a caption at the start) and the special branch officers in charge of it.
Nyles is pretty much your standard ITV thriller-issue cop. She has a teenage-borderline-troublesome daughter, an unpleasant ex-husband, and caring duties for a cantankerous dad (David Hayman), himself a former police officer, with whom Liz has endured a difficult relationship all her life. He is now suffering from the after-effects of a stroke and a new diagnosis of dementia. As a little light relief, Nyles is having an affair with her married colleague DS Paul Brandice (Barry Ward).
Jimmy McLennan (Kris Hitchen) is living in a safe house with his wife, Helen (Catherine Tyldesley), and daughter, Amy (Tilly Kaye), under the protection of a team led by Nyles while he waits to give evidence against a local drug baron, Eddie Crowther (Alec Newman). The day before he is due to appear in court, two masked men burst in and kill both parents. Amy hides and survives.
Brandice is badly injured trying to save the family. The problem is that the McLennans were not his case and he shouldn't have been there. Shouldn't have known about them, and certainly shouldn't have known where to find them. Was he the source of the leak that led to the murders, and was it pillow talk from Nyles that provided him with the information? If so, has he been using her from the start? What lengths will Nyles go to to protect herself from discovery and from jeopardising the promotion she is due to get?
And with those pieces in play, off we go. Only one episode was available for review but it seems a tasty setup, everything feels confidently executed and the twists and turns (including whether Dad had his own flirtations with corruption that his daughter now fears may come back to bite her) come at nicely paced intervals. Yes, we are asked to believe that when a suitable safe house cannot be found for the orphaned Amy, Nyles takes her to live in her family home instead, and that Nyles can break into Brandice's car to recover the phone he used to conduct their affair in more or less full view of the officers at the murder scene, but do we mind much about stretching the bounds of believability? No, not really. We all understand that we are not watching The Wire.
That said, the sense that this is a very great waste of Finneran's talents does obtrude and threaten to spoil the game at times. As a general rule, actors graduate from meaty second-string roles to simpler leads and then, if the gods are smiling on them, on to the tiny handful of meaty lead roles that are created each commissioning round. This is unquestionably a simple role for Finneran, compared with her Happy Valley stints and many, many more, but she brings everything she has to it and it is great, undemanding fun to watch. If it is the springboard to other, greater, more challenging main roles in the future, so very much the better, for her and all of us.
Protection aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now.