Criminal Record has returned for a second series on Apple TV, picking up in London with DCI Daniel Hegarty back in play after two years of radio silence with DS June Lenker. The new run opens with Hegarty sending Lenker a text message, a small move that immediately drags both officers back into the damage left behind by the first series.
Peter Capaldi’s Hegarty and Cush Jumbo’s Lenker are once again locked to the same case, and this time the message from Hegarty is blunt enough to sound like a trap and casual enough to sound like a dare. Capaldi says Hegarty reaches out with a simple “coffee?”, after telling Lenker he has “been moved to intelligence,” and then makes his pitch: “Help me run him down,” a line that lands with more menace than invitation. He also shrugs off the reunion with, “It’s better than a mini-break.”
That invitation matters because the first series ended with Hegarty manipulating an innocent man into confessing to murder, a finale that exposed how far he was willing to go. Lenker, meanwhile, is still haunted by her failure to save a teenage boy killed by far-right extremists at a political rally, and that loss pulls her straight back toward the same darkness. Hegarty has been watching a far-right group led by Cosmo Thompson, played by Dustin Demri-Burns, and one of Thompson’s boot boys, Billy Fielding, has escaped from prison. Hegarty wants Fielding to lead him to Thompson; Lenker believes Fielding was responsible for the teenager’s murder.
The second series keeps the story inside the same larger pattern of corruption that defined the first, and the review says that earlier run laid bare Hegarty’s rot. This chapter pushes deeper into systemic corruption within the Metropolitan Police while keeping London itself in view as a city marked by darkness and venality. That is the friction at the heart of Criminal Record: Hegarty may be chasing a far-right target, but he is still the officer who broke one man to close a case, and Lenker is the colleague who knows exactly what he is capable of.
What happens next is already clear. Hegarty and Lenker are headed back into a collision over Billy Fielding, Cosmo Thompson and the murder that still defines both of them, and the second series begins by showing that the old lies were never buried at all.