Wild Bill: Car chases, cops and cabbage - Rob Lowe is leading the force in ‘the home of Brexit’

Tonight, ITV, 9pm

It’s puerile to say the least, and I’m not proud of it, but I remain deliciously thrilled by a show that begins with a well-timed profanity.

And the opening sequence of new ITV drama Wild Bill is littered with delightful s-bombs, dropped by Hollywood’s own spectacularly chiselled Rob Lowe.

You can almost imagine the gleeful conversation in the writing room when it was announced they’d snared him for the lead, because in the first minute we are introduced to our American hero in the most movie-star of scenes: rocking a sweet tux as he swears with impunity and hunts down the baddies in a high-speed car chase, behind the wheel of a, er, Volvo estate as it tears through ... a cabbage field. OK, so high Hollywood spectacle it’s not quite. For Lowe has moved, improbably, from the West Wing to east Lincolnshire.

Local hero: Rob Lowe stars as US cop Bill Hixon, banished to Boston, Lincs
ITV / 42

Lowe plays Bill Hixon, the titular wild one, an apparently distinguished cop with a stellar record of crime-busting back in the US, now banished to Boston, Lincs, for sins we know not. Yet.

In these grey wastes — beautifully, broodily, shot, mind — he’s tasked with taking charge of the local force and cracking their apparently abysmal conviction rate with his “algorithms”. Sure, if he cuts a job or 600 along the way, then who’s to blame him? Apart from the rest of his team, one imagines, by the steaming piles of turd which soon arrive on his doorstep.

“Boston’s got the highest murder rate in England, been all over the papers,” he’s told. “Ten homicides last year … in Miami we had 150,” comes the droll reply. Oof. Don’t worry if you missed the subtlety, Hixon will later don a Stetson. He’s a Yank, see. But why exactly has he ventured so far from home, and does the poor 14-year-old daughter he’s dragged along for the ride have a purpose other than plot exposition?

42 / ITV

As the first of six episodes, the debut is unavoidably full of fairly clunky conversation to hasten character development — we learn through the most unlikely series of parental conversations that the pair have already moved four times in six years, that any lucky Mrs Hixon is now missing presumed lost in transit, and that the new commissioner is rocking some serious daddy problems. But thankfully it’s just 10 minutes before the real meat of the show is dropped: a shock, gory reveal and a proper whodunnit.

It’s slapdash in parts, but Wild Bill has the makings of a fine police drama: a far-more-brilliant sidekick, hints at an overarching underground network run by the powerful elite, and some terrible one-liners from its dishy, yet pleasingly troubled, star. But intriguingly, it appears that this series might go deeper than a traditional kill-and-catch: Lowe, who also has an executive producer credit, chose the location as “the home of Brexit”, a place “in turmoil and transition … a world looking for its identity”.

Throughout, there is a background of menacing political turmoil. A radio voiceover after the credits warns that here “levels of immigration have caused huge social problems … local people can’t get a job”.

In one scene, a journalist asks the new arrival where he stands on the EU. “How far are we from London?” Hixon asks. “Not far enough.” There’s a darkness here, and it goes beyond four-letter words.

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