The Scottish lochs probably aren’t going to be top of mind when listing places where crime is rampant, but in the world of Annika, people are dropping like flies over there.
Nicola Walker stars as the new DI at Scotland Police’s Maritime Homicide Unit, tasked with investigating the high body count, in a character based on one she first played on the Radio 4 airwaves.
The two-season crime comedy first aired on the BBC back in 2023, but recently landed on Netflix and has been climbing the top 10 ever since.
Walker’s wry Annika Strandhed is a single Norwegian (her accent might not know it) mother to a teenager, who’s having a miserable time at school and making it her mum’s problem.
But speedboating (which Walker has said she wasn’t always hugely fond of doing) Annika is too busy solving Glasgow’s baffling series of crimes! That and breaking the fourth wall, à la Fleabag and House of Cards.
In the opening episode, she is tasked with puzzling out a murder by harpoon to the eye (‘I think death by harpoon suggests someone who’s trying to get a point across’). No comment on whether inspiration came from the Bayeux Tapestry. Instead, there’s a protracted Moby Dick analogy.
The first season concludes with a dramatic to-audience reveal of the identity of Annika’s daughter’s father; the second season then picks up moments later.
In her interviews about the show, Walker was keen to stress that accuracy was not top of mind when making Annika – so if you’re a police procedural purist, proceed with caution.
‘We’re interested in something that’s a bit more operatic in its intentions, a bit more dramatic, a bit more theatrical,’ Walker told PBS of the show, which holds an 83 per cent score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
‘And what I love about Annika is she is a woman I really think I know, and she is someone I would love. She’s funny as well. She’s clever, she’s well-read, she’s odd and weird. If I’d met her in a room, I would definitely gravitate towards her.’
Walker is obviously no stranger to playing a copper, having starred in the espionage thriller Spooks and as Detective Cassie Stuart for years on ITV’s Unforgotten, in a performance fans have hailed as ‘exceptional’ in a Reddit thread dedicated to her acting chops.
‘I think she is one of the finest roles written for a woman on television,’ Walker said of Cassie in the same interview. ‘I thought we really gave the audience a woman they could believe in.
‘I doubt I will ever find a character like Cassie again, and that’s okay, because you have them and you have them for the right amount of time.’
Once she had exited Unforgotten, the chance to play Annika on screen arose and Walker said she couldn’t imagine letting anyone else play her radio role.
‘She’s mine. I’ve played her for 10 years on the radio. I’ve been in love with her for a decade before we even started shooting. That was a no-brainer,’ she said, noting that it did bring the sum total of cops she’s played to ‘a lot’.
She added: ‘I certainly can’t imagine ever entering that arena again. I feel like there are other parts to play and other worlds to inhabit. But if a script came through and it was amazing and the character happened to be a policewoman, yeah, I’d do it.
‘I’m all about a great script. And nothing would stop me from doing something if I thought the script was brilliant and someone wanted me to do it.’
After Annika was cancelled last year, she got the chance to flex those comedy muscles again in Disney Plus’s Alice & Steve, where she plays a mother out for revenge when she discovers her teenage daughter is dating her middle-aged pal (eek).
Annika is available to stream on Netflix.