Cracker (UK TV series)

Cracker
Created by	Jimmy McGovern
Starring	Robbie Coltrane Geraldine Somerville Christopher Eccleston Ricky Tomlinson Lorcan Cranitch Barbara Flynn Kieran O'Brien
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Original language(s)	English
No. of series	5
No. of episodes	25 (list of episodes)
Production
Executive producer(s)	Sally Head
Producer(s)	Gub Neal Paul Abbott Hilary Bevan Jones John Chapman
Location(s)	Manchester, England, UK
Running time	50 mins. (Series 1-3) 120 mins. (Series 4-5)
Release
Original network	ITV
Original release	27 September 1993 – 1 October 2006

Cracker is a British crime drama series produced by Granada Television for ITV, created and principally written by Jimmy McGovern. Set in Manchester, the series is centered on a criminal psychologist (or "cracker"), Dr Edward "Fitz" Fitzgerald, played by Robbie Coltrane, who works with the Greater Manchester Police to help them solve crimes. The show consists of three series which were originally aired from 1993 to 1995. A 100-minute special set in Hong Kong followed in 1996, and another two-hour story in 2006.

Fitz is a classic antihero: alcoholic, a chain smoker, obese, sedentary, addicted to gambling, manic, foul-mouthed and sarcastic, and yet cerebral and brilliant. He is a genius in his speciality: criminal psychology. As Fitz confesses in "Brotherly Love": "I drink too much, I smoke too much, I gamble too much. I am too much."

Each case spanned several episodes and cliffhangers were quite often used, but it was not until the end of the second series that a cliffhanger was employed to tie off the series. Some of the plotlines in the cases took as their starting point real events such as the Hillsborough disaster, while others were purely fictional with only tangential ties to actual events.

Several different psychotic types were explored during the run of the show with increasingly complex psychological motivations that, as the series entered the middle of the second series, began to expand beyond the criminals being investigated to the regular cast members. As the series moved forward the storylines became as much about the interactions of the regulars as it was about the crimes. In many later episodes, in fact, the crimes often became background to intense, provocative explorations of the police officers' reactions to the crimes they investigated.

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Wikipedia