Morven Christie plays Ellen Rooney, a pregnant Glasgow architect whose maternity cover, Vicky McClure’s Paula Reece, arrives like a dream colleague: capable, charming, equally determined to prove herself after years raising a child. Within days Paula is rewriting presentations, charming the partners and babysitting Ellen’s newborn, while Ellen’s paranoia climbs the glass walls of the practice.
Writer-director Joe Ahearne keeps the camera tight on faces and reflections, letting every polite corridor encounter curdle into menace. Paula’s backstory, delivered in fragments, suggests both genuine talent and something colder: a woman who once lost everything and refuses to lose again. The script never declares whether post-natal hormones or professional jealousy is tipping Ellen toward breakdown; instead it stages duelling voice-overs, missing files and a rooftop finale that asks which woman will plummet.
Shot entirely in Glasgow’s concrete civic buildings and sandstone tenements, the serial aired on three consecutive Tuesdays in early 2017, drawing between 8.16 and 8.5 million viewers, numbers BBC drama executives now speak of wistfully. Richard Rankin’s Ian, Ellen’s psychiatrist husband, supplies the show’s sharpest twist: the therapist who fails to diagnose his own wife’s crisis. Three 58-minute episodes, no second series commissioned, the story ends on a freeze-frame that still splits living-room audiences over who, if anyone, pushed whom.
Production Details
BBC One / 1 Season / 3 Episodes / 2017
Created by: Joe Ahearne
Showrunner(s): Suzanne Mackie, Andy Harries, Matthew Read
Writer(s): Joe Ahearne
Producer(s): Nicole Cauverien
Cinematography: Nick Dance
Music: Dan Jones
Main Cast
Morven Christie as Ellen Rooney
Vicky McClure as Paula Reece
Richard Rankin as Ian Rooney
Neve McIntosh as Kay Gillies
Navin Chowdhry as Keiran
Kim Allan as Lucy
Gilly Gilchrist as Vernon
Siobhan Redmond as Beth
Sarah MacRae as Rianne
Caoimhe Clough as Zoe
Euan Macnaughton as DS Colin Lockheid
Lexie McLean as Nina
