So what if Malpractice is boring? It’s still brilliant ...Middle East

Casualty meets Line of Duty is the easiest way to summarise ITV’s medical thriller Malpractice, which returns for a second series with a largely new cast. It is indeed made by the same production company as Line of Duty – but then so are Vigil, Showtrial and countless other TV crime dramas, so nothing particularly remarkable there. But the first series of Malpractice – which premiered in 2023 – was a cut above the average.

It saw an overworked A&E doctor, brilliantly played by Niamh Algar, having her professional and private life trawled by the hospital’s Medical Investigation Unit (MIU) after a man died of a drug overdose while under her care. The inquiry eventually broadened out to involve pharmaceutical companies and the hospital itself, exonerating Algar’s character in the process. And judging by the opening episode, this second series follows a similar plot. It is called Malpractice, after all.

The alleged negligent behaviour this time involves an on-call psychiatric registrar named Dr James Ford (Tom Hughes, who played Prince Albert to Jenna Coleman’s queen on ITV’s Victoria), who finds himself caught between two cases – Rosie, a harried mother in need of a postnatal check-up, and Toni, a psychotic patient set to be sectioned.

Being on call, his first duty is to Rosie, but his consultant persuades him to attend to the more urgent case of Toni. “Failure to prioritise because you’re afraid of your boss is no defence,” he will later be told by his stony-faced interrogators from the MIU (not a real thing within the NHS, but no matter), played by returning cast members Helen Behan and Jordan Kouamé.

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Rosie, whom Ford had hastily diagnosed as simply lacking sleep and sent home with some tranquilisers, turns out to also be full-on psychotic – eventually jumping from the hospital roof. Was Ford’s earlier check-up too hurried? Rosie’s obstetrician Dr Sophia Hernandez, played by Selin Hizli (Am I Being Unreasonable), certainly thinks so, and a blame game ensues between Ford and his antagonistic colleague.

Anyone who watched the first series will know that nobody is quite who they seem in Malpractice. Not Ford, who originally appears to be simply an overworked NHS doctor, but who later receives a text suggesting that he might have been somewhere he shouldn’t have been on the night of Rosie’s suicide. And not Hernandez, whose belligerence seems to be hiding a hidden motive. Indeed, a woman turns up outside her house towards the end of the episode, yelling “You can’t hide the truth anymore, Sophia, and when they find out, it’ll be the end of your career.” Find out what? Well, exactly.

And no doubt there will be broader issues and bigger players involved. Writer Grace Ofori-Attah, who worked in the NHS for 10 years, once again gives the proceedings an air of authenticity without overloading it with the sort of endless abbreviations that eventually made Line of Duty a bit of a joke.

Tom Hughes is going to be hard-pressed to compete with Niamh Algar’s scintillating performance in series one, and his harder-to-read psychiatrist isn’t as immediately appealing (but then his furtive nature is the point). Selin Hizli meanwhile makes a formidable foe and anyone who caught her devious character in Am I Being Unreasonable? is going to have a hard time trusting her here.

Malpractice might already feel a little formulaic after just one and a bit series, but at least it’s a novel formula. I’m certainly booked in for the duration.

‘Malpractice’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on ITV1

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