Cracker

Cracker is a British crime drama series produced by Granada Television for ITV and created and principally written by Jimmy McGovern. The series is centered on a criminal psychologist , Eddie "Fitz" Fitzgerald, played by Robbie Coltrane. Set in Manchester, it 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, unfaithful to his wife, alcoholic, a chain smoker, obese, 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.
more