Pierre review: David Harewood's charming lawyer is set to give TV mavericks a good name
No sooner have we welcomed Winter, ITV's ludicrously glossy pathologist, than here comes another mononymous maverick in Pierre (Channel 4, Mon, 9pm).
This time he's a lawyer and a very bleary-eyed one at that, roused from his bed in the dead of night to act as the duty solicitor for various miscreants and ne'er-do-wells.
Of course, this being a TV drama, Pierre – it's his first name, by the way, Pierre Jeffreys – is not only world-weary and brilliant at his job, he also comes with an 18-wheeler's worth of baggage.
He's bad with money, not able to pay the staff at his small solicitors' office, compounded by the fact that he's an inveterate gambler. This is no online slots player though, Pierre – being a maverick in a TV drama – loses his money in a backstreet basement illegal casino, all red lights and quiet green baize.
Things aren't much better at home, with a teenage son who's dropped out of university and seems to be spend 24 hours a day playing computer games in his bedroom.
The son's uncertain future is thrown into sharp relief when Pierre – played with immense charm by David Harewood – crosses paths with a young lad from the wrong side of the tracks, Michael (Ezrae Maye), brought into the police station by a very youthful-looking police constable, a PC Tanner.
Things are complicated by the fact that Michael is black, and Tanner (Tom Rhys Harries) is white, and blonde, and Michael is certain that his style of policing is far from colour-blind.
Pierre gets Michael off a charge of taking his aunt's car without consent with an appeal to his aunt's charitable side, and before long his young client is boasting of compiling a dossier on all Tanner's activities and painting graffiti depicting the officer as a 'racist fed'.
A shocking death at the end of the first episode and we're off to the races.
It's a promising start and Harewood really is excellent as Pierre, dispensing down-to-earth advice, football metaphors and funny one-liners.
And you're left in no doubt as to whose side he is on, often pledging his support for “the little people” faced with “a legal system which would chew them up and spit them out if it could”.
Meanwhile, Pierre's role as a duty solicitor allows him to come into contact with a lot of these “little people”, providing fertile ground for both comedy and some trenchant points about the unfairness of that legal system.
The drama's not shy of pointing out Pierre having “played the game”, as Michael puts it, without seeing much reward, even if the skinheads the older man battled back in the day are not so prevalent now.
It carries echoes of Cracker, the Robbie Coltrane hit of the 90s, what with Pierre's troubled home life, the gambling, the conversations about convention and the system.
It even shares a similar taste for middle-aged health problems, swapping Cracker's high-fat diet and smoking for Pierre's late-onset diabetes.
This is beautifully handled by writers John Donnelly and Roy Williams with a double – if not triple – reversal in that basement gambling den, involving Nicholas Woodeson's doctor, a side room and some hastily-dropped trousers.
In fact, the dialogue is terrific throughout and Harewood commands every scene he's in – charming, eloquent and funny, you want to spend time in his company, even though you feel he could be infuriating.
Yes, Pierre conforms to certain TV conventions, but there is enough different here to keep your interest. And unlike many mavericks, Pierre is not a savant, or an eccentric, or a law-breaker. His iconoclasm is rooted in real-life and his actual experience.
On the basis of this first episode, Pierre is one name that is going to be around for a long time.