Speaking at the BFI & Radio Times Television Festival, as part of a Q&A which also featured writer Tony Schumacher and executive producer Laurence Bowen, and was hosted by Jane Garvey, Freeman explained: "It’s not procedural, it’s not a kind of case of the week sort of thing.
"It didn’t feel clichéd to me, it didn’t feel like a lot of guys standing around saying police TV writing sort of stuff."
"This felt more personal, it felt more like the writer, whoever this person was - I didn’t know it was Tony, we hadn’t met yet - I thought, whoever this writer is has got something to say," Freeman continued.
"Not just about wider police culture or wider English society or anything like that, but just about the inner stuff that we all go through, you certainly don’t have to be a copper to relate to a lot of this stuff."
Freeman also said that he "wasn’t at all surprised to find out that Tony had been a copper for a long time" and that he thought "someone else who hadn’t been through that would find it very, very difficult to write this sort of detail".
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The Responder is already confirmed to be getting a second season, with Schumacher once again writing the scripts and filming taking place in Liverpool.
The Responder is available to stream on BBC iPlayer. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what's on tonight.
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