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Exile (2011)
7.3/10on IMDb
First aired
A journalist returns home to care for a father whose dementia has made an old professional disgrace harder to understand. John Simm and Jim Broadbent make the investigation inseparable from the work and resentment of care. Three episodes offer a concentrated family mystery, with Alzheimer's disease and painful memories carrying more weight than a neat detective triumph.
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Chimerica (2019)
6.6/10on IMDb
First aired
A photographer becomes convinced he can identify the man in the famous Tiananmen Square image, while his own decisions about images come under scrutiny. Lucy Kirkwood's four-part adaptation uses a fictional journalist to question who controls a public story. It is a demanding discovery about responsibility and power, rather than a factual solution to the real man's identity.
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South Riding (2011)
7.2/10on IMDb
First aired
A progressive headteacher arrives in 1930s Yorkshire and meets a community where education, local government and private obligations cannot be separated. Anna Maxwell Martin makes institutional change feel like daily work. The three-part Winifred Holtby adaptation is a substantial social drama in a short form, with bereavement and poverty beneath the period setting.
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Run (2013)
7.4/10on IMDb
First aired
Four linked episodes follow Londoners whose precarious work, family obligations and encounters with crime cross in consequential ways. Olivia Colman is the first point of entry, rather than the centre of every story. This is the 2013 Channel 4 serial, with an unsentimental interest in who has room to choose when money and security are running out.
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The Politician's Husband (2013)
7.1/10on IMDb
First aired
A minister's career reversal becomes a marital crisis when his wife's political prospects improve. David Tennant and Emily Watson make professional entitlement visible in small domestic decisions before it becomes more frightening. The three-part drama is an uncomfortable choice about power and intimacy, including coercion and sexual violence rather than merely parliamentary manoeuvring.
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The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies (2014)
7.9/10on IMDb
First aired
Jason Watkins plays the retired teacher whose arrest, without charge, became an excuse for public character assassination. The two-part dramatisation gives the experience of being misrepresented its own emotional shape. It is a valuable short study of media responsibility, while remaining a reconstruction of Christopher Jefferies's experience rather than a full account of Joanna Yeates's life.
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The Secret Agent (2016)
6.0/10on IMDb
First aired
Toby Jones's Verloc occupies a domestic world whose fragile arrangements are exploited by political schemes. The three-part 2016 Joseph Conrad adaptation makes a supposed spy story painfully dependent on family vulnerability. Choose it for the tension between public rhetoric and private damage, with terrorism, disability and devastating consequences central to the material.
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The Driver (2014)
6.9/10on IMDb
First aired
A Manchester taxi driver's offer of better-paid work carries him into criminal obligations that cannot stay outside the family home. David Morrissey's ordinary fatigue gives the three-part thriller a persuasive starting point. This is the 2014 British original, with a finite, tightly compressed story rather than a promise of years of criminal empire-building.
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One Night (2012)
7.8/10on IMDb
First aired
One consequential London night is reconstructed through four connected perspectives. Changing the person at the centre changes the meaning of actions that seemed settled in an earlier episode. The 2012 British serial is rewarding for a reader who likes testing assumptions about neighbours and families, with youth violence and accumulated grievance making the exercise emotionally serious.
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The 7.39 (2014)
7.0/10on IMDb
First aired
A quarrel over a seat on a commuter train develops into an affair between people whose existing lives are not conveniently disposable. David Nicholls's two-part drama gives David Morrissey and Sheridan Smith the work of making an ordinary temptation persuasive. Its appeal is the scale of the consequences within recognisable routines, not a glamorous escape from them.
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Mrs Wilson (2018)
7.4/10on IMDb
First aired
After a husband's death, another woman arrives with a conflicting claim to the same marriage. Ruth Wilson plays her own grandmother in a three-part dramatisation built from family material and research. The strongest reason to watch is the attempt to understand a relationship retrospectively, with the espionage mystery remaining more complicated than a complete, verified dossier.
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The Enfield Haunting (2015)
7.0/10on IMDb
First aired
A frightened family's reported poltergeist experiences draw investigators whose certainty and personal needs are not identical. Timothy Spall and Juliet Stevenson help make the three-part 2015 serial a story about grief as well as fear. It dramatises a famous disputed case; its effective supernatural scenes should not be mistaken for proof of what occurred.
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