David Tennant spends the four episodes dying by degrees, face hollowed by polonium-210, as Margarita Levieva keeps pace beside him as Marina, the wife who refuses to let the story be buried. George Kay’s script sticks to the fluorescent-lit facts: the radioactive trail across London bars and hotel rooms, the Metropolitan Police officers in hazmat suits, the slow-motion chase for evidence that stretches across a decade. Mark Bonnar’s granite-calm Detective Superintendent and Neil Maskell’s chain-smoking Inspector give the procedural half its engine; the other half is Tennant’s Litvinenko, dictating death-bed testimony in an accented whisper that still carries the weight of a lifetime’s defiance.
Director Jim Field Smith shoots the investigation like a contamination drill, every surface potentially lethal, every handshake a risk. The camera lingers on Geiger counters clicking over teacups and door handles while Marina battles both grief and diplomacy, carrying her husband’s accusation to press conferences and Russian courts. The series never leaves the present tense: no flashbacks to Moscow, no cosy exposition, just the poisonous now of December 2006 and the grinding years that follow.
Released on ITVX in December 2022, the drama landed while diplomatic poisonings were back in the headlines, its closing photographs of the real Alexander and Marina sealing the argument that this is not history. The final episode ends on Marina walking alone through a London square, clutching a dosimeter that clicks softly, proof that some radiation never decays.
Production Details
ITVX / 1 Season / 4 Episodes / 2022
Created by: George Kay
Showrunner(s): Jim Field Smith
Writer(s): George Kay
Producer(s): Chris May Richard Kerbaj
Main Cast
Margarita Levieva as Marina Litvinenko
Mark Bonnar as DSU Clive Timmons
Neil Maskell as DI Brent Hyatt
Barry Sloane as DS Jim Dawson
Daniel Ryan as DAC Peter Clarke
Richard Pepper as DCI Duncan Ball
Kayla Meikle as DC Deborah Maxwell
Kirsten Foster as Jenny Hyatt
Temirlan Blaev as Young Anatoly Litvinenko
Mark Ivanir as Alexander Goldfarb
Marcus Onilude as Aidan
Sam Troughton as DI Brian Tarpey
