What a viewVoice 2: why this K-drama now streaming on Netflix is not your average police show

No, not a talent show – at least not in the accepted sense – Voice 2 (Netflix) comes at the police procedural from a refreshing, if not an entirely novel, angle.

Television shows long ago decreed that the people answering the telephones when an emergency call is placed, people otherwise behind the scenes, should become familiar to us. Not all, however, have a slow-witted police unit at their disposal that they can generally boss about and taunt with, “I told you so,” at the end of a case. And few have a leader who has developed something amounting to a supersense, able to winnow out criminals when all standard techniques for catching the bad guys fail.

The Golden Time Team is a force within the force, a newfangled, Seoul-based department whose promise is that they will be on the scene of a crime within 10 minutes of an emergency call being received. It’s a sort of souped-up customer service division that actually answers the phone and doesn’t play hold Muzak.

Led by the cold, distant Kang Kwon-joo (Lee Ha-na), who has powerful, personal demons to exorcise, the team must take on some of the most despicable, sadistic criminals ever to brandish weapons in a police series. Accordingly, the not uncommon scenes of full-blooded violence here conclusively cross Voice 2 off the family-viewing curriculum.

Nor is this in any way another spin-off from some superhero universe, although a superhuman ability is the most essential pillar of the show’s premise. The details of how it was developed by the reserved, aloof Kang can be investigated fully in the original series (Voice, also streaming now), which not only ridicules the petty politics that riddle all large organisations, but exposes the hostility Kang must repeatedly fight against – not least because she’s a tenacious woman trying to introduce new ideas to a stagnant old boys’ club.