The BBC’s latest must-watch crime drama might share a Yorkshire setting, a female police officer protagonist and some truly pulse-raising jump scare moments with Happy Valley, but Better is a very different beast to Sally Wainwright’s recently concluded hit.

Lead character DI Lou Slack (played by I Hate Suzie’s Leila Farzad) might share a fondness for expletives with Happy Valley’s Catherine Cawood, but that’s about where the similarities end. Because Lou, as we soon realise in a nerve-shredding opening sequence, is a bent copper, to borrow a phrase from our old friends in Line Of Duty’s AC-12. 

When she and husband Ceri (Peaky Blinders’s Samuel Edward-Cook) are having drinks with friends, Lou confidently holding court with a sweary anecdote, the atmosphere changes as soon as she receives a mysterious call. She excuses herself with a vague comment about “work”, but it’s soon very clear that she hasn’t been summoned to complete some outstanding paperwork.

Hotfooting it out of the venue to her car, she messes around with a burner phone (red flag!) before being directed to a mystery location. Arriving there, she changes outfits, swapping her teal blazer for a black puffer and sprinting to a rundown pub. Then it’s time to put her hood up, cover her feet in plastic overshoes, and disguise her face with a half-mask before entering. It’s almost like she’s done this before. 

Inside, there’s a body. But Lou hasn’t come to investigate the crime – she has come to remove a key piece of evidence, the murder weapon, from the scene. Once she’s completed her dodgy mission, she heads back home, where son Owen (Zak Ford-Williams) is feeling under the weather.

The next day, Lou has another commitment – one that doesn’t require her to don a balaclava and forensic gear but seems just as important. Her husband, though, seems less keen to head out and socialise, citing Owen’s illness as a reason to stay behind. Through their fraught conversation, we get our first hints at the debt the couple owe to a mysterious figure – the person pulling the strings on Lou’s clandestine op from the previous evening.

“After everything he’s done for us, you can’t do one evening?” Lou hisses at Ceri, who hits back with: “What about everything you’ve done for him?” He adds that he wishes things were “different”, though his wife is quick to pull him up on his naivety. “Different, how?” she asks. “Do you wish we’d gone bankrupt? Do you wish we were still in that basement flat?”

Her guilt trip can’t persuade him, though, and Lou ends up heading out alone, until she pulls over to meet two men in a 4x4. Though she greets them with familiarity, and ends up cracking jokes about the younger one’s gold teeth grills, there’s an edge to the conversation – and the fact that she has to hand over her mobile phone for the evening doesn’t exactly lend proceedings a chilled out feel. 

What’s all the secrecy about? Lou, it turns out, is heading to the lavish home of Col McHugh (Andrew Buchan), who just happens to be one of West Yorkshire’s premier drug lords (hence the fancy house). And Lou is in his pocket, with his handouts funding her son’s private schooling. “I wouldn’t be here without you,” he tells her during his birthday speech.

It’s clear that the pair have a quid pro quo partnership that goes way back, with Lou clearing up Col’s mess and making sure that her colleagues turn a blind eye to his dealings, and Col topping up Lou’s public sector salary. But it seems that there’s more than just money at stake here. Lou doesn’t appear to be solely motivated by cash – there’s a genuine rapport between them, and their friendship, mutually convenient as it may be, is strong, almost familial.

When the party’s over and Lou’s phone gets handed back, there are tens of panicked missed calls and anguished voicemails on her home screen. Owen’s condition has rapidly worsened over the course of the evening and Ceri has rushed him to hospital, where he has been diagnosed with meningitis.

Owen eventually recovers, but everything from his mobility to his drawing skills have been seriously impacted, and it’s clear that his illness has shaken Lou, forcing her to question the choices she’s been making. Does she feel like she’s being punished for callously looking on as the murder victim faded away at the start of the episode, doing nothing to save him (he wasn’t dead when Lou arrived at the scene, as she told Col at his birthday party)?

Will this pivotal moment be a turning point, inspiring her to lead a better life? When she is called to a shop where the owner has been held up at gunpoint, Lou tries to do the right thing – even though she knows that apprehending the culprit, the aforementioned man with the golden grills, is sure to get her on Col’s bad side. 

It’s a decision that leads to a seriously stressful tête-à-tête in the back of a half-empty curry house as the episode comes to a close. Learning that his henchman has been arrested – at a safe house that only he, Lou and a handful of others knew about – he subtly questions her loyalty (after dangling the brochures for a pricey rehab clinic in her face, knowing that she’d do anything to help her son recover). Lou manages to win him over with some quick thinking – which is probably how she’s managed to juggle her detective work with her, ahem, extra-curricular activities for all these years – but something in their friendship appears to have shifted.

“This can never happen again, ever. You promise me that?” Col asks her. Her response? A simple “no”, marking possibly the first time she’s ever stood up to him. It’s this focus on the shifting power dynamics of a toxic friendship that makes Better’s first episode such an intriguing watch. Extricating herself from this mess won’t just require Lou to turn her back on a fancy lifestyle, it’ll mean untangling their complex bond and twisted loyalties – and potentially cutting a friend out of her life for good. Is she brave enough to do it? We’ll have to wait and see. 

Images: BBC