With a budget of several million pounds an episode and enough aggregate air miles to give an Elon Musk rocket a run for its money, Hossein Amini and James Watkins’s McMafia, which finished last night, was the BBC’s big bet in early 2018. Despite the name, there was nothing remotely Scottish about it – instead, it was based on the 2008 Misha Glenny non-fiction book of the same name, a study of the 21st-century global criminal underworld.

The book was an expose of the billions now made in heroin and people-trafficking, and the consequences of the “liberalisation” of Russia in the 1990s, which led to a sudden rise in ruthless gangster capitalism. The TV show, however, was a handsome BBC drama with a handsome lead in James Norton and a Bond-like predilection for scenic backdrops, including Istanbul, Prague and Mumbai. A lot has been thrown at this series to make it stick, but did it work?

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The series starred Norton as Alex Godman, a young English-bred investment fund manager. His father, Dimitri, and uncle Boris made a great deal of money in post-Soviet Russia, but now live in exile in the UK, driven out by powerful mafiosi Vadim Kalyagin. At the start of the series, Godman was determined to distance himself from the dubious provenance of his family’s money, and keen that his own fund management be clean.

But as he slipped into the murk, duplicity and danger of organised crime, it was hard to tell if Godman was just trying to protect his family, as he constantly claimed, or was acquiring a taste for power. His relationship with his girlfriend, Rebecca (Juliet Rylance), deteriorated as she realised he was hiding things from her about his business and seemed beyond repair when she was the victim of an assassination attempt in which her unborn child was killed. But this only deepened his involvement in the global crime game.

Godman is an interesting mix. There’s a bit of Tony Blair in his cultivated, acquired Englishness and his use of glossy euphemism when addressing morally unsavoury matters. With his chiselled face, he is reminiscent of Robert Shaw’s villain Red Grant in From Russia With Love. And, most obviously, there are strong echoes of Michael Corleone: the series was strewn with homages to The Godfather.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Merab Ninidze as Vadim Kalyagin. Photograph: BBC/Cuba/Nick Wall

The show faced cricitism. In these pages, Jack Seale complained that the show moved at a glacial pace and lacked incident, adding that “the domestic scenes between James Norton and Juliet Rylance, vaguely troubled in their luxury London flat, are so sterile and eerily silent they have an air of experimental theatre, like Pinter being staged in a branch of Heal’s”. But Godman is an enigma, perhaps to himself as much as anyone else. His gradual hardening, and the reasons he makes the decisions he does, are what the show is all about. This was the show’s key mystery, which was only solved in the final episode, when he revisited the Moscow apartment he grew up in. This is who he was and is; the construction of Englishness funded by his family is a lie.

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The Russian embassy also hit out against the show, claiming its depiction of its country’s criminality was “cliched”. This is a hollower accusation. What’s more, one of McMafia’s strengths was the quality and performances of its Russian actors – Aleksei Serebryakov as Dimitri, a suicidal, vodka-soaked, disgraced patriarch, and Maria Shukshina as his wife, Oksana, long-suffering, withering in her scorn for Dimitri, but forgiving towards him. Kirill Pirogov was excellent as Ilya, Kalyagin’s loyal consigliere and protector, vainly counselling the mafia man to curb his reckless, violent tendencies. Kalyagin was played by Georgian actor Merab Ninidze. A generation ago, these parts might have been played by British actors.

Our involvement with McMafia’s characters was a success, although also part of a wider failing. With the exception of the harrowing trafficking scenes in episode two, we saw too little of the human misery caused by international organised crime and how it devastates those beyond the villains. You could be lulled into thinking that all of this discreet acquisition of wealth is a tidy scam in which no one is the wiser or worse off. The monstrousness of the McMafia industry was not sufficiently stressed.

That said, it was a compelling drama, constructed with thought and care, from the casting to the excellent soundtrack by Tom Hodge and Frank Kirmann, classical strings with a subtle undertow of electronica. The show was initially compared with The Night Manager, but soon established a distinct trajectory and character. And, mercifully, it wrapped up after just eight episodes, which, in our neo-Victorian age of ever-longer narratives, is relatively concise. McMafia was just fine. Let’s leave it there.