It’s a cool May morning in East Belfast, and Blackthorn Police Station is quiet and still. Desks sit empty, some chairs topped with bottle-green standard-issue PSNI police caps. In a long corridor, a solitary plaque commemorates Constable Gerry Cliff, 1969–2023: “Who dedicated his life to protect us.” Then, faintly overheard: “Cut!”
I’m on the set of Blue Lights, the BBC’s Belfast-set police drama that follows a cohort of flawed, idealistic rookies as they navigate one of the most complicated policing landscapes in Europe. (The third season is currently streaming on BritBox in the US.) The show’s writers and creators, Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson—who met while making BBC documentaries about Northern Ireland—anchor it in the realities of current-day Northern Ireland, where paramilitary influence, drug trafficking, and domestic violence are all too common, and where psychic scar tissue from the Troubles still lingers. (There is lightness and a bit of fun in Blue Lights, too—romance, late-night craic, Westlife sing-alongs, and homemade cupcakes eaten in patrol cars.) With British TV full of cozy crime dramas, the grit and emotional clarity of Blue Lights is bracingly fresh. And since its debut in 2023, the show has become something of an international breakout, its second season winning a BAFTA for best drama.
On my visit to set I meet “Roy” (not his real name), a former Belfast detective and long-standing show advisor whose experiences have shaped the series’s most powerful beats. (“Roy gives us the visceral stuff you can’t invent,” Patterson tells me later.) He takes me on a ride-along through Belfast—together with Lawn, cast members Katherine Devlin (Annie) and Nathan Braniff (Tommy), and the show’s executive producer Stephen Wright.
We leave the fictional station Blackthorn and drive past the neighborhood of Ardoyne—volatile ground during the city’s divisive July 12 parades—and into the bowels of North Belfast. Here, two communities—Loyalist and Republican, Protestant and Catholic—live side by side. Roy explains that sectarian tensions routinely boil over, and “business as usual” could mean 200 people fighting hand-to-hand, escalating to riots or petrol bombs depending on the day. Blue Lights episodes, which are informed by the testimony of dozens of ex-officers, capture exactly that unease, and Roy is a blunt sounding board for the show’s cast and creators.
Northern Ireland remains one of Europe’s most dangerous places to be a woman; domestic violence lurks, Roy says, “behind the bigger political noise.” (The same goes for drug-running, a central plot line in season three.) Blue Lights also derives drama from the more subtle tensions of working within an entrenched bureaucracy. “We were taught there’s three religions here: Catholic, Protestant, and police,” Roy says. “I joined to make a difference—to police outside of ‘green’ and ‘orange.’” But over time, he watched metrics replace deep, human community work. Blue Lights’s rookies are constantly caught between their desire to help and the machinery they work within.
Devlin, one of the cast’s emerging stars, grew up some 50 miles from Belfast, in County Tyrone. Blue Lights was Devlin’s first major screen role after drama school; she had only just moved to London when she was called to Belfast to join the cast of season one.
Season three pushes her character, Annie, into darker emotional territory as she becomes unmoored over her mother’s death. “Northern Ireland has this potent relationship with grief—generational trauma people were told to brush off or armor themselves against. I thought a lot about that.” More people have died by suicide in this part of Ireland since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement than were killed during the 30-year Troubles.
“This season I wanted to find Annie’s softer colors, the quieter beats,” Devlin continues. “And I still question her motivations. Why would someone from her background choose policing, and keep choosing it?”
In the new episodes, the women characters drive Blue Lights’s most potent moments, whether that’s Annie, her colleagues Grace Ellis (Siân Brooke) and Aisling Byrne (Dearbháile McKinney), or their serious-minded boss, Sergeant Helen McNally (Joanne Crawford). Devlin acknowledges the power of female-driven narratives in a region where much of politics and pop culture has been fronted by men.
The cast’s intimacy after three seasons also deepens everything: “We’ve gone so much further—and I get all the gossip from our drivers,” Devlin says. “Every day has an energy. Great scenes, even better wee chats.” (Blue Lights has already been renewed for a fourth season, but Devlin would love to take on arthouse work, too—A24 films, Andrea Arnold, and Robert Eggers are all favorites.)
As we drive past Belfast’s infamous peace walls—by day a tourist photo-op, by night a flashpoint for clashing youths—Devlin’s costar Braniff, a native of Belfast, reflects on what the show has opened up for him. “I’ve lived five minutes from some of these places and didn’t truly know them. The show cracks open conversations about the past and how it shapes the present. That’s still so important.”
Later, on set, I watch Brooke film a charged confrontation between her character Grace—a social worker turned police officer, the show’s moral conscience—and a wealthy man called George, who has facilitated a cocaine-delivery app for Belfast’s moneyed elite. Brooke, who is English, tells me she’d initially worried about joining a story so closely tied to a place she wasn’t from. “People here are forthright—if it’s wrong, they’ll say,” she tells me. "But Belfast is a character: gritty, warm, witty, dry. I’m so proud of what we’ve made.”
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Before making the show, Lawn says, he thought of the police as “a monolith—a uniform.” Now he finds himself studying officers’ faces on the street. “We were very cautious about doing this show,” his co-creator Patterson adds. “It’s a hot potato. It’s hard to get anyone here to agree on anything. Making a drama that looks into the dark recesses of this place—and having people from all sides champion it—felt impossible. The only way we could do it was to be contemporary and completely honest. We could have been crucified.”
Ultimately, they see Blue Lights as part of a wider cultural moment rooted in a burgeoning interest in Ireland’s complex past (and present). Between Lisa Magee’s juggernaut Derry Girls and shows like 2024’s Say Nothing, it’s “like America with Vietnam films in the ’80s,” says Lawn. “There’s a collective moment where people start processing trauma through art.”
In season three, the writers thought about that idea of trauma, making their characters ask: Is it worth it? Is the good in policing worth the sacrifice, the personal cost? One study purports that police officers experience 400-600 traumatic events over a career. In season one, the death of Constable Gerry Cliff—shot by gangster Sully when trying to apprehend a drug deal—shook fans. “People still stop us in the street to ask us why the hell we killed Gerry,” Patterson says. “In a lot of cop shows, someone dies and two episodes later they’re forgotten. We wanted Gerry’s death to permeate the series, because that’s how life is.”
A few months after filming wraps, I speak to Devlin again when she’s in New York, where the cast are amid a promo tour that involves pulling pints of Guinness at the famed Irish bar the Dead Rabbit. When I ask her what she thinks keeps Annie and the rookie crew going, she considers this for a moment. “There’s stubbornness in her—a ballsiness I don’t have,” she says. “But there’s also hope. A kind of hope people at home don’t always say out loud. I think that’s what the show is really about: people trying, even when it’s hard. People choosing to try.”
Blue Lights is available to watch on BritBox now.
