Bodyguard

Jed Mercurio's Bodyguard launched on BBC One in August 2018 and became the most-watched British drama since records began, over seventeen million viewers for the finale, a viewership figure that no subsequent British drama series has matched. Richard Madden won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Television Series Drama. Mercurio, the writer-creator, was already responsible for Line of Duty; Bodyguard consolidated his reputation as British prestige TV's most consistently propulsive showrunner.

David Budd (Madden) is a Metropolitan Police Specialist Protection officer and veteran of the Afghan and Iraq wars whose post-traumatic-stress symptoms simmer beneath an outwardly calm professional demeanour. He is assigned to guard the Home Secretary Julia Montague (Keeley Hawes), a politically hawkish minister whose proposed surveillance legislation Budd privately opposes, and whose support for the wars he served in he privately resents. Across six episodes the relationship between Budd and Montague develops in ways neither professional brief allows.

The series is structurally unusual in that its actual operational subject (the procedural details of close protection) is more interesting than the conspiracy plotline that surrounds it. Madden's central performance is widely cited as one of the great recent British leading-man television performances. A long-promised second season has been in development for years.