Broadchurch

Chris Chibnall's Broadchurch launched on ITV in March 2013 and won the BAFTA for Best Drama Series and Best Actress (Olivia Colman). The series, alongside Sally Wainwright's Happy Valley the following year, redefined what British prestige crime television could do, moving the procedural form away from the puzzle-of-the-week toward sustained community grief. Chibnall would later become showrunner of Doctor Who; his pre-Doctor Who work on Broadchurch remains his most internationally significant achievement.

The murder of eleven-year-old Danny Latimer in a small Dorset seaside town becomes the focus of an investigation by the locally-rooted Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller (Colman, in the performance that confirmed her as one of the great British actresses of her generation) and the recently-arrived Detective Inspector Alec Hardy (David Tennant). The eight-episode first series moves at the patient pace of a community grieving in public, with the investigation as much a study of small-town texture (the newsagent, the hotel-keeper, the local vicar) as a puzzle to solve. Arthur Darvill, Jodie Whittaker and Andrew Buchan anchor the supporting ensemble.

The series ran for three seasons (2013, 2015, 2017), with the third covering a sexual-assault investigation widely praised for its procedural-realistic portrayal of how UK police and CPS handle such cases. The show was remade as the American Gracepoint with Tennant returning in the lead; the original British version is widely the version that has endured. The Dorset shooting locations (West Bay in particular) became a tourism phenomenon, with the local economy reshaped around the show in much the way Yorkshire's Calder Valley would later be by Happy Valley.