Synnøve Karlsen’s Holly arrives at Edinburgh expecting library all-nighters and cheap cider; instead she watches her best friend Aisling Franciosi’s Georgia vanish inside the Solasta Women’s Initiative, a velvet trap run by lecturer Louise Brealey’s Jude and banker brother Emun Elliott’s Alistair. The scheme funnels high-achieving female students into internships, then into the beds and boardrooms of Scottish finance bros. While Georgia glows with new-found favour, Holly digs through expense-account receipts and nightclub receipts until she realises the currency is coercion and the product is silence.
Series two swaps the clique of alpha girls for a boys’ cabal fronted by Leo Suter’s Jack, an MSP’s son running a campus masculinity society and a sideline in sexual-blackmail dossiers. Holly, now a minor celebrity after exposing Solasta, is adopted as Jack’s pet contrarian, a role that costs her the trust of housemate and survivor Sophia Brown’s Lou. The action widens from student bedrooms to the Scottish Parliament as leaked videos and burner phones topple careers, yet the engine remains the same: older power feeding on undergraduate ambition.
Created by Jess Brittain, a Skins alumnus, the show keeps the Bristol series’ taste for narcotic nights and moral whiplash but replaces teen angst with a chillier adult transaction: marks are swapped for contacts, bodies for references. Shot in bruised blues and sodium glare, Edinburgh’s cobbles and cranes look newly predatory, a city where every spire casts a longer shadow. BBC Three released the six-episode first run online-only in March 2017; a second six-parter landed in November 2018 before the channel cancelled the property.
Production Details
BBC Three / 2 Seasons / 12 Episodes / 2017
Created by: Jess Brittain
Writer(s): Jess Brittain, Milly Thomas, Kirstie Swain
Main Cast
Synnøve Karlsen as Holly McStay
Rachel Hurd-Wood as Rachel Maddox
Sophia Brown as Louise Taggart
Mark Strepan as Rory Sawyer
Aisling Franciosi as Georgia Cunningham
Emma Appleton as Fay Brookstone
Sorcha Groundsell as Elizabeth Smith
Ella-Rae Smith as Phoebe Parker-Fox
Louise Brealey as Jude McDermid
Chris Fulton as Charlie Lamont-Smith
Emun Elliott as Alistair McDermid
Izuka Hoyle as Dani
