Borderline crosses the line - Village Magazine

66 October-November 2024

There’s some lip service to this idea in

‘Borderline’, but it’s unclear whether it’s

accidental or deliberate.

PSNI detective chief inspector Philip Boyd

(Eoin Macken) is introduced playing a church

organ (he’s religious, got it?) but while the

clichéd southern view of a northern Protestant

would be a ﬁre and brimstone Paisleyite, Boyd

is instead a member of a milquetoast

congregation coded like an Anglican church in

the home counties, more Vicar of Dilby than

Free Presbyterian.

Meanwhile, his Garda counterpart Aoife

Regan (Amy de Bhrún) is an atheist lesbian,

skipping over the traditional banality of the

priest-ridden South in favour of the newer

stereotype of the liberal post-Celtic Tiger

Ireland. Regan’s characterisation mostly

seems to embody anger at everyone. Anger at

co-workers, anger with suspects and

witnesses, the local vicar, and her elderly

neighbour. Her barely sketched underlings

also spend a lot of time barking at PSNI

counterparts. She has a mysterious backstory,

embracing the fact that Regan may not be her

real name, having left a Dublin posting under

mysterious circumstance in one of the least

plausible witness-protection programmes

ever. She now performs the same job as before

less than a hundred miles up the road, after

landing a high-profile position as lead

investigator on a cross-border murder enquiry

which has attracted media attention. Boyd,

meanwhile, is the son of a murdered RUC

oﬃcer, still haunted by the memory of that

event, and obsessed with the man he believed

Borderline crosses the line

Derivative cross-border buddy-cop

algorithmic stereotype needs rewrite

By Gerard Cunningham

hen ScandiNoir crime drama

Bron/Broen ﬁrst débuted on

Irish television screens a

decade ago, I joked on Twitter

that RTE should hook up with

the BBC to make an Irish version, with a Garda

and a PSNI detective forced to work together.

They could even set it in a cross-border twin-

town divided by a border river and connected

by a small bridge. Somewhere like Pettigo/

Tullyhommon or Blacklion/Belcoo.

But it was not to be. While the English and

French made the Tunnel (a Sky/Canal+

co-production), and an American drama called

The Bridge was set along the US/Mexican

border, no one picked up on the obvious Irish

parallel – at least until now.

‘Borderline’, from independent television

company ShinAwil, with funding from Screen

Ireland and Lionsgate Television, and

streaming on Roku in the US and MGM+ in the

UK and Ireland, feels exactly like a show which

someone pitched as “Bron, but Irish”.

Unfortunately, that feels like the sum total of

the imagination that went into making the

show. The characters are wooden and

underdrawn, meaning that the intricately

designed crime plots are poorly served.

The foundational joke in Bron was that the

two mismatched characters each ﬁtted the

stereotype held of them by the other’s nation.

Danes regard Swedes as cold and unemotional,

so Saga Noren is initially presented as a

transactional robot running on logic, while

Swedes consider the Danes to be, well,

schlubby guys like Martin Rohde.

As if someone generated

it by feeding AI with

pages from the ‘TV

Tropes website’, without

the warmth or expert

characterisation which

that site celebrates

did it, who lives a few miles across the border.

One of the founding commonplaces of the

buddy-cop genre is the mismatched odd

couple who learned to work together, and sure

enough in the opening scenes between Boyd

and Reagan they squabble incessantly.

But the drama never takes the time to show

why they should have quarrelled on ﬁrst

acquaintance, other than that’s what happens

in this kind of show. Whatever mix of bad

blood, squabble or jurisdictional egos is at play

is never made clear to the viewer. The two leads

ﬁght with each other because that’s what

people do in this kind of show, and for no other

reason.

That initial scene is symptomatic of the

problems with the schtick. The story in every

aspect feels algorithmic. Sure, it has the basic

form of a piece of police-drama-shaped

content, but the suspicion is always there that

someone generated these stories by feeding

AI with pages from the ‘TV Tropes website’,

outputting a tale full of well-worn clichés but

with none of the warmth, humour, or expert

characterisation which that site celebrates in

good storytelling.

Granted, some of the failings are in the mind

of this Irish viewer (who sat through three

Garda tribunals, one involving cross-border

frictions between garda and RUC oﬃcers).

Even so, the show undeniably evinces a broad-

brush approach to Irish history and culture. The

ﬁctional border area where it takes place has

an active GAA culture, for example, but the

sport of choice there would be hurling, not

football.

There is the germ of a good idea in a clash of

cultures between North and South, and

occasional ﬂashes of insight do feature. But

this undercooked show will need reworking

and more rewrites to realise its potential if it is

renewed.

PSNI deecive chief inspecor Philip Boyd (Eoin Mcken), wih his

Grd counerpr Aoife Regn (Amy de Bhrún), n heis lesbin

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VillageOctNov24.indb 66 03/10/2024 14:27