Crime dramas are a dime a dozen on television these days, from straightforward procedurals that follow familiar story beats to twistier psychological thrillers aimed at shocking audiences with violence or gore. Many are very good, but some are truly special — and, likely, you haven’t even heard of one of the best.
BritBox’s Time first premiered in 2021 and offered viewers a gritty, intense look at the inner workings of the British prison system. While this may sound like a series you’ve seen before, the show’s dedication to exploring complex moral and emotional themes about both crime and punishment sets it apart from so much that has come before.
What Is ‘Time’ About?
Time is an anthology series, with each of its three installments to date set at a different correctional facility. The cast changes each season—save for Siobhan Finneran‘s prison chaplain, Mary Louise O’Dell, who serves as a sort of connective tissue between them all—as do the larger themes each outing attempts to address.
Season 1 takes place in an adult male prison, following a guilt-ridden first-time inmate (Sean Bean) struggling with the harsh realities of prison life and a righteous guard (Stephen Graham) who falls into unexpected corruption. Season 2 shifts the series’ focus to a women’s facility and explores the specific challenges and difficulties female prisoners face within the system. Its story is told through the intertwined lives of three prisoners: A single mother (Jodie Whittaker), a pregnant 19-year-old (Bella Ramsey), and a woman serving a life sentence for murdering her own child (Tamara Lawrence).
While both of these installments are excellent — Season 2 in particular is astonishing in the ways it reflects the complicated community these women form together — the show’s third (and perhaps final) season is far and away its best.
‘Time’ Season 3 Is Both Harrowing and Haunting
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(Photo: Courtesy of BritBox)Time Season 3 completes a triptych of shorts, moving the anthology’s story into the volatile world of a young offenders institution. And despite the frequently dark subject matter of the series’ first two seasons, this third outing is devastating in entirely new ways. Perhaps it’s because the offenders at the center of this story are just so young, but there’s an extra air of tragedy to proceedings that’s as much to do with futures irrevocably lost as crimes committed.
Former Doctor Who star David Tennant plays corrections officer Bobby Bailey, a man worn down by both an unhappy marriage and the daily moral compromises his job requires. Yet he is also one of the few to display anything resembling compassion for the charges in his care, and Tennant’s sharply restrained, understated performance deftly illustrates both his personal misery and his professional frustration. Finneran’s Mary Louise offers both Bobby and the inmates some rare interludes of kindness and support, but it’s a tiny candle in a hurricane of larger institutional and societal problems.
Time smartly resists the urge to soften the ugliness that sits at the heart of its story. While some of the prisoners at HMYOI Alderwick are good kids who were caught up in bad situations, they’re all in jail because they committed serious acts of violence. James (Louis McCartney) murdered his disabled brother. Peter (Olly McNulty) was part of a group of boys who essentially left a badly beaten man for dead in the street. There’s gang violence, arson, and robbery, and the costs of these acts are not softened in the name of garnering sympathy for the (often quite likable) young cast. Instead, the show focuses on the ways that the system in which they’re all trapped lets down everyone — from the under-resourced employees who work at the prison to the inmates themselves.
‘Time’ Deserves to Be As Big a Hit as ‘Adolescence’
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Though the series aren’t technically connected in any narrative way — they’re written and produced by different people, and though both involve correctional facilities, their stories are focused on different themes — Time‘s third season feels like a kindred spirit with Netflix’s smash drama Adolescence, and the BritBox show deserves to be just as big a hit.
Throughout, creator Jimmy McGovern and co-writer Sam Bailey‘s scripts walk a fine line between accountability and redemption. From the ugly nature of violence and the insidiousness of toxic masculinity, which urges these young boys to solve problems with fists and knives, Time approaches its characters with empathy and curiosity, even as it refuses to make excuses for the choices that have landed them in their present situations.
While Tennant and Finneran both give standout performances, it’s the young men you won’t be able to stop thinking about once the final credits roll. Chukwubuikem Okonkwo skillfully depicts both his character Christopher’s debilitating stutter and his longing for a relationship with the birth mother he never knew. Ethaniel Davy finds compassion for Jayden, who repeatedly self-harms over his guilt at not speaking up for a fellow inmate. While McNulty’s warm new father Peter is perhaps the most haunted of Alderwick’s residents, he is also repeatedly pressured into violent acts of loyalty to the gang that has taken him in. These young actors are incredible across the board, and will deserve the awards and accolades that are (hopefully) coming their way.
At its heart, Time asks what our prison systems cost us — not just in terms of justice, a concept that is both important and ever-present, but in the constant coarsening of our shared humanity. Perhaps most of these boys are tragically past saving, but surely, we should still be able to do better than this, both for them and for ourselves.
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