Luther

Neil Cross's Luther launched on BBC One in May 2010 and won Idris Elba the Golden Globe for Best Actor and the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actor across the series's six-season run. The series ran from 2010 to 2019 and was followed by the 2023 feature film Luther: The Fallen Sun. The series consolidated Elba, after his earlier American work on The Wire, as one of the most internationally significant Black British actors of his generation.

DCI John Luther (Elba) is a brilliant but volatile London detective specialising in major-incident investigations, psychological profilers, serial killers, large-scale conspiracies. The series follows his work across each season's central case alongside his continuing relationship with the unconvicted serial killer Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson, in the supporting role widely cited as her career-defining work) (a brilliant astrophysicist whose intellectual chemistry with Luther anchors the show's most-discussed structural commitment.

Cross's writing) sustained engagement with the conventions of the British procedural while pushing them toward broader operatic-drama register, produced one of the most distinctive prestige procedurals of its era. Elba's central performance, with the long camel-overcoat costume that has become permanently associated with the role, is one of the most-imitated leading-detective images in 2010s British television. Wilson's parallel career (including the American Showtime series The Affair for which she won her own Golden Globe) was substantially launched by the early Luther seasons.