Killing Eve

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Killing Eve launched on BBC America in April 2018 and was nominated for the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series and the BAFTA for Best Drama Series across multiple seasons. Adapted from Luke Jennings's Codename Villanelle novellas, the series ran for four seasons until 2022, with Waller-Bridge as showrunner of the first season and a rotation of subsequent showrunners (Emerald Fennell, Suzanne Heathcote, Laura Neal) for the seasons that followed.

An MI5 desk-job security officer named Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh, in the role that would re-establish her major-prize career) becomes obsessed with tracking a glamorous, unpredictable assassin who works under the codename Villanelle (Jodie Comer, in the role that launched her into international stardom). The cat-and-mouse pursuit unfolds across European capitals (Paris, Berlin, Tuscany, Romania, Moscow) and the obsession turns out to be entirely mutual, with the two women's professional and personal interest in each other becoming the series's central engine. Fiona Shaw plays Carolyn Martens, the MI6 senior officer who originally recruits Eve.

Comer's central performance (a sustained range across half a dozen accents and identities, switching between absolute physical menace and absurdist comic delivery) won her the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2019. The series's distinctive tonal commitment to combining genuine procedural-thriller with broad-comic and stylish-fashion-cinema register became continuing reference for the post-Waller-Bridge prestige-drama landscape.