When Bodyguard hit BBC screens in 2018, it arrived with the sort of force that makes a whole city stop talking for a second. For a brief moment, it felt like Britain had found its next big political thriller—sharp, breathless, and anchored by a lead performance that felt raw enough to scrape. The series follows David Budd, a war veteran turned police protection officer, played by Richard Madden with a kind of guarded intensity that instantly hooks you. Tasked with shielding the highly divisive Home Secretary Julia Montague, Budd gets dragged into a political storm where nothing—absolutely nothing—lines up neatly. And that’s where the trouble starts.
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A Masterfully Crafted Opening Act
If you ever need proof that television can still surprise you, the show’s opening twenty minutes will do it. The train sequence—Budd negotiating with a potential suicide bomber—is a masterclass in pressure. It’s slow-burning, unnervingly quiet, and brutally intimate. By the time the standoff resolves, the series has already set up everything it needs: Budd’s trauma, his strained loyalty to the government, and the simmering distrust he hides beneath the uniform.
Madden’s performance here is magnetic. He doesn’t play Budd as a blockbuster hero, but as a man simply holding it together—barely, at times. The direction is lean and confident, letting moments breathe instead of cluttering them with unnecessary flair. For a while, it genuinely feels like the show is gearing up to be one of the great modern political thrillers.
A Narrative That Cracks Under Pressure
But Bodyguard has bigger ambitions than its own structure can manage. After the exceptional start, the story begins stretching itself thin: government conspiracies, counterterror intelligence, internal sabotage, secret deals, organised crime—you name it, the series piles it on.
Killing off Julia Montague halfway through is a gutsy move, and it shocks the story into a new direction. The problem is that the show never truly recovers from removing its most compelling dynamic. With Montague gone, the narrative starts darting between plotlines like it’s trying to outrun its own confusion. Holes appear everywhere, and the more the series tries to explain, the less any of it feels grounded. By the penultimate episode, it’s hard not to feel as if the writers were improvising, hoping the audience wouldn’t look too closely.
Character Depth Sacrificed for Plot Twists
What’s so frustrating is that Bodyguard shines brightest when it leans into character rather than spectacle. Budd and Montague’s relationship—part chemistry, part power struggle—is the emotional backbone of the entire show. Keeley Hawes plays Montague with a controlled ambition that makes every scene with Madden tense and layered.
Once her character exits, the emotional stakes collapse. Secondary characters become cardboard pieces positioned for the next twist rather than believable people making messy decisions. Their motivations shift when the plot needs them to, not when it makes sense for the story. For a show that starts off feeling so deeply human, this loss of authenticity hits hard.
Style and Substance: An Uneven Balance
Visually, the series is slick. London looks cold, watchful, and heavy with political shadows. The sense of paranoia is constant and well-crafted. But as the episodes go on, the style starts to overshadow the substance. The infamous final stretch—the explosive-vest sequence—is certainly tense, but it feels engineered rather than earned. The show wants to tackle trauma, surveillance, and corruption, yet these themes get buried under increasingly improbable turns.
It’s not that Bodyguard becomes bad; it simply stops being the show it promised to be.
Verdict: A Promising Start with an Unfulfilling Payoff
Bodyguard is a series split cleanly in half. The first three episodes are electric—expertly written, tightly acted, and impossible to look away from. Madden delivers a performance that deserved every bit of praise it received.
But the back half buckles under the weight of its own ambition. The twists become more frantic, the logic more fragile, and the finale lands with a thud instead of a roar. It’s still a gripping ride, just not the timeless political thriller it initially seemed destined to become.
A must-watch for its highs—but a reminder that even the strongest openings can falter when a story tries to outrun itself.
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