Say Nothing

Joshua Zetumer's Say Nothing launched on Disney+/Hulu in November 2024, adapted by Zetumer from Patrick Radden Keefe's 2018 non-fiction book of the same name. The series received nine Emmy nominations including Outstanding Limited Series, and Golden Globe nominations in the same category. Keefe's book had become the most-discussed non-fiction work on the Northern Ireland conflict since the 1990s; the series adaptation extended the conversation it had started.

The series interweaves multiple timelines around the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a Belfast widow with ten children whom the IRA accused of being a British informer. Across nine episodes, the series follows the rise of Dolours and Marian Price (Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe as the young versions, Maxine Peake as the older Dolours) within the Provisional IRA, the post-Good Friday Boston College oral-history project that recorded participants' testimonies, and the eventual unsealing of those testimonies in the Belfast Project legal case.

Anthony Boyle as the young Brendan Hughes provides the third corner of the central trio. The series's careful handling of Gerry Adams's denied IRA membership (required for legal reasons but also dramatically necessary) is one of its most respected achievements. Each episode ends with a card noting that Adams has always denied membership, a structural choice that became a small joke and then a serious frame.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most morally serious dramatisation of the Troubles produced this century, and the rare prestige limited series that respects rather than simplifies its source material. The young-actor casting is one of the great recent ensemble achievements.