Stream It Or Skip It: ‘DI Ray’ On PBS, Where A Police Inspector Tries To Solve A Murder While Fighting Against Her Department’s Biases

When Parminder Nagra was cast in ER in 2003, she was coming off the lead role in Bend It Like Beckham, and it seemed like she was poised to become a big star. She was one of ER‘s leads during its final six seasons, which is no small achievement. So it was a surprise when she didn’t get many lead roles in the years since, popping up in supporting roles in shows like The Blacklist. Now she finally has another lead role in a British cop series, and she shows exactly why she was so highly sought after in the 2000s

DI RAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman stares at a store end cap with bottles of wine. She picks up one bottle, then sees a sign about a free bottle, so puts more in her basket. A older man, thinking she works there, asks her where the eggs are.

The Gist: As she makes her way home, DI Rachita Ray (Parminder Nagra) almost gets run over by a car that drives onto a set of stairs. It turns out the driver has a knife and wants to do harm; he stabs a patrolman as he runs. She chases him into a public square and manages to talk him into putting the knife down.

Her off-duty heroics get her a commendation, and one of her bosses, DCI Martyn Hunter (Jamie Bamber) introduces her to Superintendent Ross Beardsmore (Ian Puleston-Davies). Beardsmore thinks DI Ray is the perfect fit for an opening he has in the homicide division, then she asks him what part of India her family is from, in not as casual a way as he might have thought.

On her first day in homicide — after being given the badge of another Indian officer before getting hers — her boss, DCI Kerry Henderson (Gemma Whelan) puts her in charge of a case that’s considered a “CSH”, or a culturally-specific homicide.

Ray worries that she’s just there to “tick a box”, and she says so to her boyfriend — DCI Hunter. He basically tells her that, now she is there, she should take advantage and make her mark.

As the investigation continues, it seems that there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence against brothers Navin and Kabir Kapoor (Ryan McKen, Manpreet Bachu). Ray isn’t quite sure that they’re the right suspects, and if he can just talk to the dead man’s girlfriend, who also happens to be the suspects’ sister Anjuli (Lucky Sanghera), she’d find out more. But DCI Henderson wants the case to be quickly settled, and she feels there’s enough evidence against the brothers to hold them on murder charges, telling Ray that “the community” wants a quick resolution to the case.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? DI Ray is a fairly standard British cop series, along the lines of The Tower (which Whelan happens to star in), but with underlying themes of cultural bias in policing mixed in.

Our Take: We’ve been fans of Parminder Nagra ever since she started on ER 20 years ago, and we were wondering why her career since that show ended consisted of mostly supporting roles, given how significant her role on the NBC mega hit was in its later years. So it’s good to see her as a lead in a series after all these years, and she carries DI Ray well, for a lot of reasons.

The show, created by Maya Sondhi, definitely telegraphs the issue of bias from the first moments past its opening credits, when Superintendent Beardsmore asks Ray what part of India her family’s from. Through the entire first episode, Ray is in the position of fighting that bias, especially when it comes to what her superiors think they know about her connections to the community. It’s evident that she’s more British than anything else when she’s assigned a liaison officer, PS Tony Katri (Maanuv Thiara) to help communicate to the families of both the victim and the suspects. When he sits down with them, he’s like a guest in their home, but Ray acts like the police detective she is.

Those themes, where Ray has to fight to prove her worth as a homicide detective and not an “Indian homicide detective”, will elevate the show beyond just the standard British cop fare. Ray not only has to do this in the face of her department’s institutional bias, but it’s also in spite her years on the force and the fact that she’s already a detective inspector.

It feels like the team around Ray is mostly generic, with some of the detectives more in support of her than others. What we found odd is that when she gives them an order that seems perfectly reasonable, they’d look at her as if she’s either out of her mind, breaking protocol, or doing something else that’s strange. Is there something about Ray’s presence that bothers them? There doesn’t seem to be enough outward context to help us understand the subtext of those looks.

Sex and Skin: We see Ray and DCI Hunter in bed together, but it seems that it’s way after anything has happened.

Parting Shot: Ray speaks to Anjuli in a playground, as Anjuli requested. The girlfriend of the victim gets scared off when someone approaches behind Ray. Ray’s knocked unconscious as Anjuli runs off.

Sleeper Star: Will Ray’s relationship with Jamie Bamber’s character, DCI Hunter, who seems to ask her to marry him on the regular, be explored more? It does seem like Ray being in a relationship with a superior in the department would have certain implications, but for now it seems like a story that Sondhi might not explore. Perhaps if the show gets a second season, we’ll see more of that.

Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing stands out as completely head-smacking, but the moments where Ray is told that “the whole point” of being brought on board was to work with the community aren’t subtle

Our Call: STREAM IT. The main reasons to watch DI Ray are Parminda Nagra’s lead performance and the theme of her fighting against bias in her department. We just wish the case being investigated, and some of the characters surrounding Ray, were more compelling.

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.