Giri/Haji

Joe Barton's Giri/Haji launched on BBC Two in October 2019 and was nominated for the BAFTA for Best Drama Series and Best Supporting Actor (Will Sharpe). The eight-episode series became one of the most internationally exported British prestige drama productions of its year, the first BBC drama broadcast simultaneously in Japanese with Japanese-language original dialogue. The title is Japanese for Duty/Shame, the two principal moral concepts the series operates around.

Detective Kenzo Mori (Takehiro Hira), a Tokyo Metropolitan Police officer, travels to London to find his younger brother Yuto (Yosuke Kubozuka), who is believed to be responsible for the murder of a yakuza boss's nephew. The murder threatens to ignite a gang war between the two main Tokyo yakuza factions; Kenzo's investigation in London draws him into the city's Japanese diaspora, the Met's organised-crime detective network (Kelly Macdonald), and a young half-Japanese sex-worker (Will Sharpe) whose own life intersects with the Mori family's.

The series operates simultaneously as procedural crime drama and intercultural family-melodrama. Barton's screenplay weaves Japanese-language sequences (including substantial subtitled material), London-set procedural-thriller sequences, and a particular animated-watercolour interlude that became one of the year's most-discussed prestige-television set pieces. Sharpe (who had begun his career as a screenwriter and director (Flowers)) won particular critical attention for his central supporting performance.