Patrick Melrose

Edward Berger's five-part adaptation of Edward St Aubyn's autobiographical novels arrived on Sky Atlantic and Showtime in 2018 and was immediately one of the most acclaimed limited series of the decade. Each episode covers a different decade of Patrick Melrose's life and draws directly on St Aubyn's celebrated cycle: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk and At Last. David Nicholls (best known for the novel One Day) wrote the scripts, compressing thousands of pages of interior monologue into screenplay form.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Melrose, and it is the best performance of his career; he won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actor and was nominated for the Emmy and the Golden Globe in the same role. Hugo Weaving plays Patrick's father and Jennifer Jason Leigh his mother, with Indira Varma, Allison Williams and Anna Madeley filling out the wider Melrose orbit. Berger (who would later make All Quiet on the Western Front) directed every episode, which gives the series an unusual stylistic consistency.

Tonally it belongs to a small British tradition of acid-tongued upper-class portraiture, somewhere between Evelyn Waugh and Alan Bennett, with the chemical edge St Aubyn's prose is famous for. Limited series on this scale rarely hold their reputation. Patrick Melrose has, partly because the source novels remain in print and partly because the central performance has become a standard example of how literary interiority can be put on screen.