<em>Bodyguard</em> Is Tense, Twisty, and Totally Absurd
David Budd’s brow furrows in the opening seconds of Bodyguard, and that’s it—it will never unfurrow again. For the rest of the Netflix series’s six episodes, David (Richard Madden) will be a walking, grunting, hyperalert bundle of stress and physical rigidity, his jaw in a permanent clench, a ripple of valleys where the space between his eyebrows used to be. That isn’t Kevlar turning his torso into a square box of starchy polyester: It’s duty.
To be fair, he goes through a lot. of British television, a London-based police officer and an army veteran who continually happens to find himself in the middle of an improbably numerous onslaught of terrorist plots and personal vendettas and gunfights and explosions and Chekhov’s Range Rovers. is the brainchild of Jed Mercurio, a former doctor and air-force officer best known for the police drama , a similarly twisty and propulsive thriller. But like , expands its horizons to cast a big, knotty, conspiracy-theorist net over the police forces, the intelligence community, and the upper echelons of the British government. Unfortunately, another similarity it has with is a propensity to lean on stereotype, adding to the woefully limited characterization of Muslims on mainstream television shows.
