Stephen Graham, an actor who looks like he’ll bite your head off if you say the wrong thing and the quiet star of Line of Duty, White House Farm and Save Me, lands on Sky One in a comedy. A comedy – yes, you read that right.
In the Evening Standard Lucia Pavia neatly sums up Code 404 as “a gloriously daft police show that takes Hot Fuzz and Robocop and puts them into a blender… This is not a brainy, nuanced comedy, but with silly one-liners and Naked Gun-style slapstick, it seems to hit the spot”. The Telegraph’s Anita Singh (paywall) loves it: “This is an original comedy from Sky and possibly their best one, thanks to the cast. The joy is that in another universe this could have been a po-faced drama, and the three leads are sending themselves up.”
Alongside Stephen Graham are Anna Maxwell Martin and Daniel Mays and in The Times Carol Midgley (paywall) writes: “It isn’t quite as good as its stellar cast promises it should be partly because, brilliant though Stephen Graham is, I’m not sure he is a natural comedy actor… Daniel Mays is terrific as the resurrected cop John Major (a nod to our former leader?) and proving to have great comic timing and excellent gurning abilities… It’s the daft sort of content required right now.”
It’s by no means a Must TV classic, but Code 404 is daft and fun, and well worth a go.
Code 404 first shown April 2020. You can watch the trailer by pressing play on the show image, or by clicking here.
