Season 1 of Collateral started out decent but gradually went on the decline each episode. Their was way too many characters and subplots for a mini series to be focusing on and it took away from the main plot. Amazing cinematography at times and did give us a good sense of the gritty London setting. The performances were very good and elevated the show slightly despite the sloppy writing. Most of their characters however, were just not interesting or did not add anything to the story. Some of them did not even progress the story hardly. I am especially looking at the Karen, David and the priest Jane. Too much time spent on them, I was not fond of the actress who played Sandrine, very wooden, not much emotion and was just bored when she was on screen. A lot of the story raised important questions on immigrants, refugees etc... but it all felt contrived and never offered us any answers really. It was not all bad, but whenever something interesting did happen, they just rushed past it. Made it hard for me to care. Collateral was a series that never hit the mark for me and I might be being generous here.

6/10

This show, like so many other British TV shows, uses a conspiracy involving members of some security forces in its principal plot. It’s an oft-repeated plot.

Secondly, the personal lives of several characters have no bearing on the plot, so their purpose seems to be only to fill the time.

On the plus side, this is a serious TV show that concerns itself with a very real problem in Britain.

I watched this primarily because Nicola Walker is in it and she never disappoints. As much as I loved her in River and Unforgotten, it’s was refreshing to see her play a non-detective in a police show detective (she was brilliant as a perpetrator in another series).

This series has a lot of moving parts so you shouldn’t be distracted as you watch it. Another review states that personal details of some characters seem to be included as filler, and who I knows I of it is true, but I often find these shows or movies about conspiracies easy to predict in some of their details, but whether it was intended or not, the moving chess pieces kept alive so many possibilities I found i didn’t know where aspects of the plot were going.

So I found it to be entertaining. My only wish is that a couple of the characters did quite get what I thought they deserved.