Stop right now because this November, BBC First takes on crime solving with two new shows. First to premiere is Blue Lights, a six-part drama series starring Siân Brooke (Sherlock, Good Omens), Martin McCann (Marcella, Sentinel), Richard Dormer (Game of Thrones, Fortitude), Katherine Devlin (The Dig, Vikings) and newcomer Nathan Braniff, following three rookie police officers working in Belfast. The fall programming lineup continues with Black Ops, a six-part comedy thriller created by BAFTA award-winning actress and writer Gbemisola Ikumelo (Brain in Gear) and BAFTA award-winning actor and producer Akemnji Ndifornyen (Famalam, The Queen’s Gambit). The series focuses on Dom and Kay, two characters who join the Met Police in the hope of cleaning up their community but are unwittingly thrust into the murky world of deep cover infiltration as they become part of a powerful criminal enterprise. Blue Lights premieres Thursday, November 9 at 9 p.m. ET/PT and Black Ops premieres Friday, November 10 at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT, exclusively on BBC First, during the channel’s nationwide free preview event running from October 30 until December 31, 2023 across 8 million Canadian households.
Blue Lights (6×60′ HD)
Thursday, November 9 at 9 p.m. ET/PT
Grace, a mother of a teenage boy, has made the decision in her 40s to leave her steady job as a social worker to join the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Her fellow rookies are Annie, who struggles with the fact that her chosen path may mean leaving everything she’s ever known behind, and Tommy, who is desperate to prove himself despite being disastrously inept at the practical side of frontline response policing. All three are new police officers in their probation period with the PSNI; the odds are at least one of them isn’t going to last. The pressure is immense, but if they succumb to it, they won’t survive.
Black Ops (6×30′ HD)
Friday, November 10 at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT
Shifts just got real. Bored of the beat, two under-qualified, undercover cops are thrust into a criminal underworld. Set in East London, community support officers Dom (Gbemisola Ikumelo) and Kay (Hammed Animashaun) infiltrate a local gang as part of an “off the books” operation, creating a television series that is chaotic comedy with high stakes, high risk and high panic.
Blue Lights is produced by Two Cities Television and produced with special support from Northern Ireland Screen as part of their continued partnership with BBC for BBC One. The series is written and co-created by Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson (The Salisbury Poisonings). Blue Lights was co-created and co-produced by Louise Gallagher of Gallagher Films, and co-created and produced by Stephen Wright of Two Cities Television.
Black Ops is a BBC Studios Comedy Production co-produced with Mondo Deluxe. It was created by Gbemisola Ikumelo, Akemnji Ndifornyen, Joe Tucker (Witless) and Lloyd Woolf (Witless), and was commissioned by Tanya Qureshi, Head of Comedy for the BBC. The series is produced by Akemnji Ndifornyen and the Executive Producer for BBC Studios Productions is Josh Cole. The Commissioning Editor for the BBC is Gregor Sharp and BBC Studios is the international distributor for the series.
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