Danny Boyle's kinetic pilot drops American spin doctor Brit Marling into New Scotland Yard as the Met lurches from one reputational grenade to the next. Across six bruising hours she locks horns with dinosaur commissioners, twitchy firearms officers and the rolling-news machine, all while a sniper, a botched raid and echoes of the 2011 riots keep the body count climbing. The show cuts between boardroom farce and street-level dread: in one thread Daniel Kaluuya's embedded filmmaker captures trigger-happy cops, in another Jill Halfpenny and Andrew Brooke play married officers on rival units, their domestic pillow talk laced with bullets and body armour.
Writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain mine the same satirical seam that powered Peep Show, but here the cringe comedy lands on shattered glass. A YouTube clip of a Tasering spirals into a capital-wide manhunt; a tone-deaf tweet costs lives. Channel 4 cancelled the drama after a single season, citing scheduling gymnastics, leaving the finale's riot footage as an accidental coda to a city still nursing bruises.
Production Details
SundanceTV / 1 Season / 6 Episodes / 2014 - Present
Created by: Danny Boyle, Sam Bain, Jesse Armstrong
Showrunner(s): Sam Bain, Jesse Armstrong, Danny Boyle
Writer(s): Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain, Jon Brown
Producer(s): Derrin Schlesinger, Robert Jones
Cinematography: David Raedeker, Balazs Bolygo
Music: Stuart Earl
Main Cast
James Nesbitt as Richard Miller
Brit Marling as Liz Garvey
Ella Smith as Mia
Nick Blood as Warwick
Andrew Brooke as Banjo
Bertie Carvel as Finn Kirkwood
Paterson Joseph as Charles Inglis
Daniel Kaluuya as Matt Coward
Tom Andrews as SCO19 Commanding Officer
Lauren Taylor as Al-Jazeera Reporter 3
Damien Matthews as Paul
Tom Anderson as SCDI Officer
