Criminal Record’s Daniel Hegarty Is a Morally Gray Masterpiece

One of the most complicated questions at the heart of the new Apple TV+ drama Criminal Record is how we’re meant to feel about Peter Capaldi’s DCI Daniel Hegarty, a decorated officer who’s benefited from decades of working at an institution that has long privileged those who are white and male. Resentful of recent changes in the name of increased diversity and inclusion in the world of the Metropolitan Police, he doesn’t react well when thirtysomething DS June Lenker (Cush Jumbo) starts digging into an old case of his and wondering whether the wrong man was convicted of the crime. 

Did Errol Mathis (Tom Moutchi) murder his girlfriend? Or was he simply in the wrong place at the wrong time? Is Hegarty simply looking to protect his reputation or hiding some much darker secrets? And is June, a Black woman trying to navigate a career as part of an institution that often seems to openly resent her presence, over-eager to prove her professional bonafides or on the cusp of uncovering a larger racist conspiracy? In the world of Criminal Record, there are always more questions than there are answers, and never more so than where Hegarty is concerned.

The very best of a cast of intriguing morally gray characters, Hegarty is an enigma from his first moments onscreen. Brooding and lurking in dark corners like the best sort of gangland criminal, he’s a dogged investigator who seems more than willing to do whatever it takes to close his cases. Yet he is also capable of genuine kindness and has clear moral lines he’s unwilling to cross, even in the name of making things easier for himself or his clearance rate. (Your mileage may vary on how you read Hegarty’s specific moral code, but he does, in fact, have one.) 

“We were very keen that Criminal Record wasn’t [going to be] that sort of classic good cop-bad cop story because that’s not what we think people are like,” executive producer Elaine Collins tells Paste. “Real people are much more complicated than that and most people have good and bad in them. [The duality of this character] was something we were keen to explore right from the beginning. Luckily, it also makes great drama. It keeps everybody guessing all the way through.”

Unlike many of Capaldi’s previous performances, Hegarty is a more “veiled” and withdrawn figure and, as a result, is much harder to get a handle on. Unlike, say, Doctor Who’s Twelfth Doctor or The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker, this isn’t a man who is likely to rattle off a heartfelt speech or burst into a waterfall of creative profanity. Instead, the generally inscrutable nature of his character often leaves viewers wondering how we’re meant to feel about him. And that’s on purpose, according to the show’s creators. 

“I think the whole joy of it is that you can’t quite get a grasp of who that character is a hundred percent,” Collins says. “He’s all of those things—a moral man, a good cop, a bad cop, a questionable father—and a little bit of other things too. And I think we were keen to keep teasing out across the series so that when he arrives—and especially when it’s some two-hander scene between he and Cush—you just can’t wait for it. You’re excited for it. You want to find out more.”

Part of what makes Capaldi’s performance so compelling is that it—as well as the character of Hegarty himself—contains multitudes. Petty enough to send internal affairs after a colleague that’s annoyed him and more than willing to rattle off tales of grisly crimes during his side gig as a chauffeur to the wealthy, he’s also a man who repeatedly proves himself capable of genuine loyalty and surprising kindness.

“Conflicted is exactly how I think you should feel about Hegarty. He is a chess board, with a chess game going on, and it keeps on being turned around,” Cush Jumbo, who plays DS June Lenker, adds.  “If June, who is so headstrong cannot work it out, then nobody can. And I think that’s the beauty of the character that Peter plays in such a special way.”

Capaldi, for his part, is a bit cagier when it comes to talking about what makes Hegarty tick. 

“He’s a survivor,” he explains. “He has led a life that is dark. But he’s still there. He puts one foot in front of the other and gets through the day. He’s still standing. He knows the world and he has no illusions.” 

The question, of course, is what sort of secrets he’s hiding, both from the audience and potentially from himself.  

“I suspect Peter would disagree with me about this, but I think that—and certainly at the start of the show—Hegarty is a man who doesn’t really quite know himself,” creator Paul Rutman says. “He doesn’t quite know who he is. And I think just as we’re drilling down into him, he is stumbling across uncomfortable truths about himself. For him, the story is also a story of self-discovery.” 

June’s arrival in his life is a key driver of that journey, as she forces Hegarty to confront his own legacy—both in terms of protecting the career he has built and ultimately reckoning with the choices he’s made along the way.

“He’s a survivor, but he is also someone who’s been waiting,” Rutman continues. “I think a little part of him—and we often talked about this—a little part of him has always been waiting for that knock on the door, has been waiting for someone to walk through and point their finger at him. And I think when June walks in, he thinks, ‘Okay, game on.’ So there’s a certain relief, there’s a certain relish. And I think for him, the stakes were immediately raised. And so in a way, it is a battle for survival.”

“I think if we all get to Hegarty’s age and we’re still there, we’re still in the game, then we’re all survivors,” Collins laughs.

For everyone involved with Criminal Record, it was important to make a crime drama that eschewed many of the genre’s expected stereotypes. Both Hegarty and Lenker have preconceived ideas about who the other is and how they—as an older white man and an up-and-coming Black female officer—see the institution of policing.

“I think the characters that we play have a depth to them, have a complexity which is more reflective of real people doing those real jobs,” Capaldi says.

And it’s the complexities and tension between Hegarty and June that ultimately make Criminal Record such watchable television. Neither character is perfect and both make errors and incorrect assumptions throughout the series, as each outsmarts and one-ups the other over the course of their eight-episode-long sparring match. 

“That relationship is the soul of the show,” Collins says. “I think it’s sort of easy to [call it] a cat and mouse or David and Goliath [relationship] or whatever, and truthfully we were sort of keen to lead the audience towards thinking that that might be what they’re going to get, but then sort of rug pull all the way through. Every time you think you know what you’ve got and you think you know who someone is, the rug is pulled and the audience is thrown again and intrigued again. And I think that was our intention right from the start.”

Despite the fact that June and Hegarty spend the bulk of the season at odds with one another, the two have more in common than either of them would probably like to admit. 

“If you look at the characters around each of them, look at June’s family life, look at Hegarty’s colleagues, everyone lets them down,” Rutman adds. “I think there’s a feeling for them that everyone else falls away and that the only people left standing at the end are the two of them and this story. And so there is that sense of almost mentoring. There’s a chemistry there and I think there is a growing mutual respect that they are real to each other and they’re still there and they’re still fighting.”

And as their perceptions of one another’s motives shift over the course of the series, their feelings about each other evolve as well. 

“I think at the beginning he thinks she’s someone that he can brush off really easily, Collins says. “But I think his respect for her grows throughout the arc of the story. I think he sees her as a worthy opponent.” 

But as these two morally comprised characters circle each other, Criminal Record asks uncomfortable questions about unconscious bias, systemic racism, and the differing perspectives held by colleagues of different generations, particularly in an institution that has undergone significant changes in recent years.  

“I think the truth is there are no answers,” Rutman says. “What we have are big institutions that have a mechanical instinct to protect themselves and that you have the humans who work in them and those humans like the rest of us, frail, fallible, and just trying to figure things out. And Hegarty’s no exception to that and neither is June.”

Criminal Record is the sort of crime drama that doesn’t exactly make things easy for its viewers. Bleaky, twisty, and populated by characters who aren’t always particularly easy to like, it’s a show that’s much more interested in asking questions than in answering them. How you, as a viewer, feel about Hegarty will likely depend on how you read Capaldi’s performance—is he a relic of a bygone era of police history we’re well rid of? A closet racist?  A dedicated crime fighter? Somewhere in between? Maybe you’ll settle on an answer by the time the series’ final credits roll—but don’t be surprised if you happen to end up with more questions along the way.

Criminal Record is streaming weekly on Apple TV+ through February 21st.

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV