Every so often the same worry resurfaces about Line of Duty — that the show is one departure away from folding, that its future rests on whether its stars can be coaxed back into the interview room. The newest version of that worry pins it on Vicky McClure, as if the anti-corruption unit were hers to shut down. It isn’t, and she isn’t going anywhere. The three actors at the centre of British television’s most durable procedural are all coming back. Which means the question everyone keeps asking is the wrong one.

The real jeopardy has nothing to do with who’s in the cast and everything to do with who holds the property — a distinction the coverage keeps quietly blurring. Line of Duty does not belong to the BBC in the way a viewer might assume. The corporation can order more of it; it does not own it. The people who do are now being courted by companies with far deeper pockets and a proven appetite for exactly this kind of tried-and-tested, unmistakably British machine.

The renewal itself is unambiguous. Martin Compston, McClure and Adrian Dunbar all return in their original roles for a six-part series, with Jed Mercurio writing and World Productions producing in association with ITV Studios. AC-12 has been disbanded and rebranded the Inspectorate of Police Standards; in that colder climate Steve Arnott, Kate Fleming and Ted Hastings are handed their most sensitive case yet, built around a decorated organised-crime detective, Dominic Gough, accused of abusing his position as a sexual predator. Mercurio, characteristically dry, says corruption was supposed to have ended while the show was off air, so he has been forced to use his imagination.

So the creative engine is intact. What isn’t settled is the ownership underneath it. World Productions holds the intellectual property; the BBC holds only the recommissioning rights; ITV Studios handles distribution. Into that gap, according to a report in The Sun, Netflix and rival streamers are said to be circling — drawn, the paper’s source suggests, by deep pockets and a hunger for proven British drama.

Anyone who has watched how these things go will recognise the shape of it. Netflix has already reheated BBC-born properties into event cinema, turning Peaky Blinders and Luther into films, and it has dealt directly with World Productions over Line of Duty’s back catalogue before. The procedural is the most portable format television has ever devised — self-contained cases, a unit that can be re-staffed at will, a brand that arguably outlives any single face on the call sheet. AC-12, the interview-room duel, the strip-lit ‘mother of God’ of it all: those could, in theory, run without any one of the Three Amigos.

That portability is a virtue on BBC One and a temptation everywhere else. A streamer that acquired the property would have every incentive to treat it as a franchise rather than a series — spin-offs, parallel units, a season a year, the trio gradually optional. And that is where the show has most to lose. What made Line of Duty singular was compression: one writer’s paranoid clockwork, a small ensemble, the slow-burn interrogation stretched past comfort, the discipline of a short British run that made each hour feel load-bearing. Loosen those constraints and you don’t get more Line of Duty. You get content wearing its waistcoat.

The lesson of every over-extended crime franchise is that the format survives and the feeling doesn’t. The next AC-12 case will find out who Dominic Gough really is. The more consequential interrogation is the one happening off screen — over who gets to keep making the show, and whether the answer preserves the thing that made anyone care in the first place.

Tags: Netflix, BBC, Line of Duty, police procedurals, Vicky McClure