This gritty British crime drama gambles on a radical approach – and it’s a winner

The Cage ★★★★

Prodigies who burst out of the gate brimming with ambition and attitude are all well and good, but there’s something to be said for screenwriters who’ve been around people and bring a sense of life’s complexities to the page. One of the best examples is Tony Schumacher, the 59-year-old from Liverpool responsible for creating one of the best British shows in recent years: 2022’s police procedural The Responder, which took Martin Freeman’s fractured uniformed officer to the edge.

Schumacher only started writing for television in 2018, when a mentoring scheme connected him with the revered Jimmy McGovern (Cracker, Time). Prior to that, he’d worked in Liverpool as a police officer and taxi driver, before trying his hand as a novelist. Schumacher’s characters are rounded in deeply felt and idiosyncratic ways, and they have a lived-in authenticity that actors thrive on. The skill was apparent in The Responder, and it’s prominent once more in Schumacher’s new series, The Cage.

Set once again in Liverpool – the accents alone are rife with anthropological detail – it’s a crime thriller with hard-nosed parameters that nonetheless has a sense of empathy for its inhabitants. Good and bad are superfluous phrases here. Everyone is capable of both, whether they’re willing to admit that or not is what matters. The show is sharply tense not just because of the missteps and grim choices facing these Liverpudlians. There’s also always the hope that they can grasp the moment and try to change for the better.

Leanne (Sheridan Smith) and Matty (Michael Socha) are colleagues at the Envoy, a fading casino that empties out with every grey dawn. Both need money – Leanne and her children are faced with homelessness due to bureaucratic constraints, while Michael is a recovering drug addict with a raging gambling addiction – and both have twigged to how they can siphon off cash from the safe of their employer. Once each realises what the other is doing, they’re inextricably linked. They sink or swim together.

Schumacher and director Al Mackay (Cobra) unfold this shaky alliance with everyday detail and concise visual notation. The first time Leanne and Matty talk about their fraud she’s precise, and he’s barely able to concentrate. Matty can’t concentrate because of the burble of a fruit machine in the corner of the greasy spoon they’re in – every time it crescendoes with a payout, his head swivels with uncontrollable hunger. Leanne is already wondering if Matty will drag her down, or if he could be the scapegoat she needs.

Escalating over five concise episodes, the story builds out with complication and colour. The dual theft is too extensive to hide, so the local crime boss, Gary (Barry Sloane), using the casino for money laundering is searching for the culprits, while a police detective, Ning (Sophie Mensah), is steadily probing the Envoy for people she can turn into informers. But these interactions rarely make do with archetype. Matty, for example, has an unsatisfied loan shark in Paul (Louis Emerick), but they’re also old friends saddled with violent rituals.

Both Smith and Socha give accomplished performances. The scenes Leanne and Matty share with their respective families are illuminating. The self-loathing and regret that comes out of Matty when he’s even briefly around his teenage daughter, Emily (Freya Jones), is wrenching. That flawed humanity also gives The Cage a radical approach to the crime genre. It’s Leanne and Matty’s better instincts that may actually offer them a way out.

The Cage airs at 8.20pm on Sundays on the ABC and ABC iview.

Want more TV? We’ve got you.