Informer

Throughout Informer, one feels just about anything could happen to its characters. This show’s heedless willingness to embrace narrative risk means more than its occasional wrong steps, and makes for an experience well worth trying.

Not all of it works. But the bulk of it does and there are ongoing surprises along the way that deepen the story. ... Even when Informer hits some potholes (and plot holes), it stays on track because Rizwan, Nsengiyumva and Considine never flag in their performances. It's truly great work from all of them.

Whereas similar shows have ended with a tidy conclusion, these kind of investigative dramas are richer for going beyond the backstory of a single crime to explore how much it continues to resonate long after the story ends.

Where Informer falters, which it markedly does, is with characters whom the writers seem to have assumed they could sketch in easily. Mostly, these are women. ... Informer has its finest moments when it considers the reverberations and repercussions that each person’s behavior has on others (despite the fact that everything comes together in far too clunky a form in the final episode).

As refreshing a character as Raza is, and as crackling as the scenes in his milieu can be, there’s another chunk of the story--the cop chunk--that appears to have been beyond Haines and Noshirvani. For every cliché and leaden bit of dialogue they kept out of the story of immigrant life, they tossed one into the story of undercover police work and its toll on those who are condemned to do it. ... But when Rizwan is on screen, it has a bounce, an engaging lightness.