I yield to no one in my adoration of, and in times of particular strife, emotional dependence on Law & Order and its many offspring. I hold the increasingly baroque 20 seasons of L&O: Special Victims Unit in particularly high regard. Twenty seasons! The immutable Mariska Hargitay as detective Olivia Benson deserves a specially-minted award for managing to hold back both the forces of NY evil and time with equally relentless determination.

But! There is no doubt that the police procedural is overdue a shakeup. And now it’s here, courtesy of George Kay and Jim Field Smith, who have created Criminal (Netflix). The former wrote and the latter directed these three self-contained episodes of a crime anthology series, each of which focuses entirely and intimately on a suspect’s interrogation. The camera moves between the interview room and the officers watching on the other side of a one-way mirror, and occasionally into a corridor beyond – but never strays beyond the police station. There are three more blocks of three stories set in France, Germany and Spain – written and directed by people from the relevant countries, adhering to the original template.

Those of you with long and retentive memories might see in it – especially the first UK episode – shades of the greatest TV drama ever made, A Wanted Man by Malcolm McKay. It can probably be more usefully likened, though, to the interrogation scenes in Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty at their best. It has their relentless scrutiny of the guilty (or not) party, and unabashed preference for subtle detail over showboating and cliche – but with a plot that builds to its own eminently satisfying conclusions and doesn’t rely on a working knowledge of a dozen police units’ favourite acronyms. An air of menace and tantalising truth suffuses every scene. It feels new, fresh and rather thrilling.

Of those I’ve seen (all the UK ones, a sampling of the others) there has not been a weak instalment, but the opening UK hour is a particularly strong one. The script is finely whetted – slightly too scalpelly in places to be entirely believable, but after 20 years of the Dick Wolf formula, the breasts of even we devotees may cry out to let the blade imbrue – and the episode has possibly David Tennant’s finest small-screen performance at its heart. It’s a pared down, brilliantly balanced presentation of a doctor, Edgar Fallon, who is suspected of raping and murdering his stepdaughter. He spends the first half of his interrogation cleaving to his solicitor’s advice to say nothing but “No comment”, until he can bear it no longer. Then we follow him through the subsequent sinewy twists and turns as he offers up plausible alternatives for the evidence against him. The glory will go to Tennant as the guest star, but Lee Ingleby deserves just as many plaudits for his equally restrained, unshowy and completely convincing performance as the officer in charge of the investigation. They work together like a dream.

Every episode is a spare, precision-engineered hour without a wasted shot or beat. If it feels occasionally just slightly too slick or the writing slightly too clever, these are very much forgivable flaws. Overall it feels like Law & Order: Terence Rattigan Unit and I love it, even if I never thought I’d see the day.