Patrick Melrose

Edward Berger's five-part adaptation of Edward St Aubyn's autobiographical novels arrived on Sky Atlantic and Showtime in 2018 and immediately became one of the most acclaimed limited series of the decade. Each episode covers a different decade of Patrick Melrose's life, drawn directly from 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 — adapted the scripts, compressing thousands of pages of interior monologue into screenplay form.

Benedict Cumberbatch leads as Melrose and the performance was widely treated as career-defining; 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 plays the 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 the show belongs to a small British tradition of acid-tongued upper-class portraiture, somewhere between Evelyn Waugh and Alan Bennett but with the chemical edge St Aubyn's prose is famous for. Limited series of this scale rarely hold their reputation; Patrick Melrose has, in part because the source novels remain in print and in part because the central performance is now studied as a textbook of literary adaptation.