Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Trinity Of Shadows’ On HBO Max, Where A Murder Brings Up A Painful Cold Case For A Detective, A Rookie Cop And A City Councilor

Dark police dramas have the looks of a police procedural, but it becomes pretty clear from the start that the case at hand is just part of what’s going to be examined. The police detectives’ lives and their motivation for solving the case are picked apart. The motivations of other players are also touched on. And there’s still the matter of who actually committed a crime. HBO Max’s new Taiwanese series has all of these elements.

TRINITY OF SHADOWS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A little girl watches a stranger approach where she’s hiding; she sees him from behind the slats of a closet door. When he opens the door, there’s blood on his hand.

The Gist: A sex worker named Niko (Huang Wei Ting) tries to leave the bar where her john (or it could be her boss) works, and he slaps her hard when there’s a struggle. She accidentally hits an alarm as she falls down, and the police show up. They bring in everyone in the room on possession charges, but the lead detective, Hsu Tze-Wei (Sandrine Pinna), is determined to get Niko to tell her who hit her.

As Det. Hsu tries to get Niko to press charges, she learns that the amount of drugs they found wasn’t enough to hold the guy who hit her. When Hsu notices that Niko left, she chases her down to convince her to think about filing those charges. Niko frustratingly tells her that she is more worried about an online stalker that she reported to the cops weeks ago, and little to nothing has been done.

In the meantime, a city councilor named Yang Chi-Hsiao (Kaiser Chuang) challenges the commissioner from the local precinct at a council meeting; his assertion is that the cops under his command have been filing false timesheets to get overtime, and it seems to be an endemic problem with the police force in that precinct. When a reporter reminds Yang that his father had issues with that same precinct, Yang smiles and says that he’s just doing his job.

Also in the meantime, a rookie cop named Chen Chia-Hao (Kuan-Ting Liu) volunteers to find a bunch of missing Vietnamese migrant workers after reporting to Director Huang (Tzu-Chiang Wang) that they’ve already been found. In order to help that along, he enlists his girlfriend, the very same Niko, to talk to her sister, whom Chen has been using as an informant. Niko tells him about the “pervert” that’s been harassing her, but then gets irritated when he gives her an “informant fee” to give to her sister. Given her background as a sex worker, she sees it as payment for sex, but Chen assures her that she’s not a hooker in his eyes.

When Niko is sent out on a call that she at first refuses to go on, Hsu goes to her building when a neighbor reports a strange man trying to enter her apartment. The intruder is arrested, but Niko is attacked as she makes her way to her client.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The dark themes of Trinity Of Shadows certainly gives us the feel of other dark police series like True Detective or The Killing.

Our Take: The story that writer Chien-Ming Huang has crafted for Trinity Of Shadows is certainly a slow burn. In the first episode, the trinity of the title is set up, with Det. Hsu, rookie cop Chen and Councilor Yang’s personalities coming into focus as the episode goes along. Hsu is definitely informed by childhood trauma, as we see in the flashbacks of her hiding in the closet as two adults argue. But it does look like he show will try to go even deeper than that.

Yang’s dealings with the 3rd Precinct go beyond just making sure that the officers are honest about their hours, and Director Huang seems to think that Yang is going to be a thorn in his side for some time. And Chen’s connections with Niko and the case that her murder brings back might go way deeper than anyone thinks.

Chen is the character that’s the hardest to figure out. He seems to be a fumbling rookie cop, telling Director Huang white lies to keep him from blowing up, but then he seems to be pretty confident with Niko, and is talking like this job isn’t his first go-around in law enforcement.

But that mysteriousness might be on purpose, and all the better if that’s the case. At this point, the cold case that Niko’s murder digs back up hasn’t even been discussed, but when it is, all three of the main characters will really be fleshed out well, given each person’s involvement in that case.

Sex and Skin: Niko has sex with Chen, under covers of course. At the end of the episode, there’s a pretty stark depiction of a sexual assault.

Parting Shot: As Niko is left for dead, we pan up to the murky area where she’s located. Then we see it in the light of day, and it’s even grungier.

Sleeper Star: Huang Wei Ting does a fine job as the doomed Niko, especially in the scene where she confronts Chen about the nature of their relationship.

Most Pilot-y Line: Yang goes into the same bar where Hsu is playing darts and shifts his baseball cap to wear it backwards, like he’s still in college.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While the first episode of Trinity Of Shadows has a few minor plot inconsistencies, it does a good job of setting up its characters’ relationship to both a new murder case and an old one that’s closely related.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.