The six-part series stars Rose Ayling-Ellis (EastEnders, Reunion, Strictly Come Dancing) as Alison Brooks, a Deaf woman who is working in a police canteen when a wildly unexpected opportunity presents itself.
With the gang often meeting in locations that make listening in an impossibility, the detectives need her to fill in the blanks by studying CCTV feeds and hidden cameras. And despite their initial scepticism about whether she's up to the job, a running theme in her life, Alison's contributions immediately move the needle.
But while the lip-reader-turned-detective premise is an instantly compelling one and is brilliantly suited to creating moments of intrigue and tension, what makes the ITV series such a vitally important piece of television is what it has to say about disability.
It isn't Alison's Deafness that motivates her to take up DS Ashleigh Francis's (Ghosts' Charlotte Ritchie) initial offer to help the detectives crack the case, or what motivates her to secure a job at The Canterbury Tap, or why she continues surveilling the gang even after DI James Marsh (Broadchurch's Andrew Buchanan) initially fires her for jeopardising the investigation.
Now, that's not to say that being disabled in a world that isn't built for her would undoubtedly have forced Alison to toughen up, so to speak, so as not to allow society to ignore her or infantilise her or take advantage of her. It's likely that Alison's determination and confidence would have been emboldened due to navigating spaces and situations that disregard her very existence.
But regardless, that's not the whole picture. Those aforementioned characteristics are intrinsic to who she is. The seeds were always there, and Alison chose to water them.
To portray her as impressive or captivating simply because she's Deaf would not only disregard so much of who she is and what else she brings to the table, it perpetuates the notion that disabled people aren't capable of living a normal life, and they're unlikely to achieve anything, so that when they do, it is something to marvel at and behold.
In a TV landscape which is still sorely lacking in disabled representation, Code of Silence is the blueprint.
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