Tom Burke plays Cormoran Strike, a former Special Investigation Branch operative who lost half a leg to a landmine in Afghanistan and now trades on the army contacts that still take his calls from a grungy Denmark Street office. His partner, Holliday Grainger’s Robin Ellacott, arrives as a temp and stays for six increasingly perilous books, her own investigative talent eclipsing the fiancé who wants her safe at home. Each of the six BBC series adapts a single J.K. Rowling/Robert Galbraith novel, from 2017’s The Cuckoo’s Calling to 2023’s The Ink Black Heart, with a seventh, The Running Grave, now filming for 2026.
The show keeps the novels’ trick of making every case personal: Strike’s own family history surfaces in Lethal White, while Robin’s past as a rape survivor shapes the hunt for the Shacklewell Ripper in Career of Evil. Directors rotate—Michael Keillor, Kieron Hawkes, Sue Tully, Charles Sturridge—yet the palette stays resolutely wintry, all pea-soup skies and pub back-rooms where pints settle next to case files. Beth Rowley’s smoky theme “I Walk Beside You” drops the viewer straight into that world before a single body appears.
Nineteen fifty-eight-minute episodes have delivered a knotty, slow-burn alternative to the CSI formula: interviews stretch, clues simmer, and the final reveal usually hinges on a stray remark someone made three weeks earlier. Cinemax carried the first four runs in the States; HBO took over for Troubled Blood, doubling the trans-Atlantic audience that now waits for Strike and Robin to finish what they started in a graveyard on the Norfolk coast.
Production Details
BBC One / 6 Seasons / 19 Episodes / 2017 - Present
Created by: J.K. Rowling, Ben Richards, Tom Edge
Showrunner(s): J.K. Rowling
Writer(s): J.K. Rowling, Tom Edge, Ben Richards
Producer(s): Ruth Kenley-Letts, Neil Blair
Main Cast
Tom Burke as Cormoran Strike
Holliday Grainger as Robin Ellacott
Jack Greenlees as Sam Barclay
Kerr Logan as Matthew Cunliffe
Ruth Sheen as Pat Chauncey
Caitlin Innes Edwards as Ilsa Herbert
Sophie Ward as Anna Phipps
Sutara Gayle as Kim Sullivan
Ian Redford as Ted Nancarrow
Sarah Sweeney as Lucy
Samuel Oatley as DI George Layborn
Jonas Armstrong as Saul Morris
