Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Payback’ On BritBox, Where A Woman Gets Caught Up In A Crime Boss’ Business After Her Husband Is Murdered

There are times when the cast of a show outshines the writing, when everyone is doing such a top-notch job that you can forgive plot hiccups if they’re not too egregious. A new British thriller streaming on BritBox has just such a stellar cast — and a bit of a convoluted plot.

PAYBACK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As two kids go down a hall followed by their au pair, their mom sits at the top of the stairs, watching.

The Gist: Lexie Noble (Morven Christie) is making sure her new au pair, Doris Szabo (Eileen Duffy) is doing the job. Her husband, Jared (Thoren Ferguson) tries to reassure her as he gets ready for a morning jog before he sets out to work from home. As he gets ready, he sees that over £2 million hitting an account he’s monitoring. This is after we see that much in cash being carried out by a courier and brought to a bank.

Lexie says she’s going to the gym, but is actually following Doris to make sure she brings the kids to the park. On her way back from there, she sees Jared outside a news agent store; he’s surrounded by hooded teens and comes out of it with a fatal stab wound.

At the same time, Police Scotland DC Jibran Khan (Prasanna Puwanarajah) is monitoring a transaction for a private island; he has intel that hotel and restaurant magnate Cal Morris (Peter Mullan) is bidding on it anonymously. Given the dealings Morris has had in the past, DC Khan is pretty sure making the connection between Cal and the bid will let them trace the money back to its source. One problem: The last payment of over £2 million doesn’t go through before the deadline.

Morris wonders what happened to the payment, and when he consults with his lawyer, Malky Roberts (Steven Mackintosh), he finds out that his accountant, none other than Jared Noble, had a convoluted system to keep the money clean, but the access to an account in Malta that would transfer to a solicitor for the last payment died with him. Morris orders Roberts to try to see if Lexie, a partner at Jared’s accounting firm, knows anything at all that can lead them to that account. But they can’t contact her directly, in order to keep investigators off their trail.

After finding out from friend and solicitor Rufus Hayes (Henry Pettigrew) that Jared was liquidating a lot of their accounts, Lexie fetches papers from Jared’s office, including a book full of passwords, which make no sense if you don’t know the cypher he uses to add to the numbers that are written down. On her way home, her purse is stolen, and Roberts happens to be there. The purse is given to Morris, who looks through it, then makes contact with Lexie and writes her number down in case she finds anything.

When she gets home, she finds instructions to a lockbox. She manages to find it in the basement and, using the password book and Jared’s cypher, gets inside. She finds a burner phone and some papers; the only number on the burner is Morris’. When she calls it, Morris is alerted to the fact that someone has the burner. He eventually gets in touch, and meets with Lexie; if she can get him info on the account that has his money trapped in it, he can help her figure out who might have killed Jared. He assures her, though, that he didn’t have anything to do with it, despite previous stabbings having been linked to him, as she found out by searching his name.

The police are onto the fact that not only was Jared’s stabbing premeditated, but DC Khan figured out Jared was working for Morris. After turning the Nobles’ house upside down, the police find a credit card with suspicious charges, indicating that Jared was going to leave Lexie and move to Miami with another woman, something Lexie just refuses to believe.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The tone of Payback, written by Debbie O’Malley, has more of a tone of a show like Line Of Duty than the shows O’Malley is known for, Call The Midwife and Humans. The comparison makes sense, since Line Of Duty‘s Jed Mercurio is an executive producer of Payback.

Our Take: At first glance, Payback seems like a standard British crime thriller. There’s a murder, and an investigation, and ancillary people involved that may or may not have anything to do with the case. But Payback flips things a bit; it’s told from the perspective of two people who weren’t directly involved in the murder at the show’s center, but they certainly want to know exactly what happened, and for very different reasons.

Mullan and Christie, both veterans of the genre, are top-notch here, especially in the scenes they’re in together. Mullan, always menacing, is menacing for a different reason here; while Morris obliquely threatens Lexie by saying that “I’m not a person you say ‘no’ to,” he also knows that without her, he won’t get his money. And she knows that, with his connections, he might find out who had it in for her husband. O’Malley sets up an interesting dance between these two, who are on opposite sides of this story but depend on each other to get what they need.

The cops in this story aren’t extraneous, which sometimes happens when the story centers on characters that aren’t police. Khan and his colleague Alice Hardy (Grace Chilton) are going to be investigating the financial connections, and Khan is desperate to get his boss to see that financial investigations are worth the time and effort to pursue. And, while it seems absurd that the cops investigating the murder, Jean Royce (Andi Osho) and Rob Livingston (Steven Miller), are keeping their eyes on Lexie, knowing what we know, their line of pursuit is logical given the evidence.

But it’s going to be the strange co-dependent relationship between widow and crime boss that’s at the center of this complex, and at times confounding, mystery, and given what we’ve seen from Mullan and Christie so far, the prospect of seeing more of that will keep us interested.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As Khan listens in — the police bugged the smoke alarm at the Nobles’ house — Lexie opens a package that shows what Jared was really doing with all of those charges to the card. As Lexie sobs, Khan continues to listen in.

Sleeper Star: This is a tie between Grace Chilton as Alice and Eileen Duffy as Doris, mainly because they seem to have more to do with this story than the first episode would indicate.

Most Pilot-y Line: Not sure how airtight the scheme Malky Roberts put together to not get in direct contact with Lexie is, given the fact that both he and Morris make their presence and association with Jared clear a few minutes into the interaction.

Our Call: STREAM IT. By flipping the perspective, Payback gives the traditional British crime thriller a somewhat fresher look, but it’s the show’s leads that really get our attention.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.