Sherwood

James Graham's Sherwood aired on BBC One from June 2022, produced by House Productions and directed by Lewis Arnold and Ben A. Williams. Graham, by then established as one of the most prolific British political dramatists of his generation (This House, Brexit: The Uncivil War, Quiz), set the series in his home town of Sutton-in-Ashfield, in the Nottinghamshire coalfield, and built it around two unconnected real-life murders that took place there in 2004. A second season followed in August 2024, expanding the canvas to a second generation of the same families.

David Morrissey plays Detective Chief Superintendent Ian St Clair of Nottinghamshire Police; Robert Glenister is DI Kevin Salisbury of the Met, sent up from London with a difficult shared history. Lesley Manville plays Julie Jackson, a long-time friend of St Clair's whose family becomes central to the inquiry, with Joanne Froggatt, Adeel Akhtar, Alun Armstrong and Stephen Tompkinson rounding out the village's interlocking households. The political backdrop, the 1984 to 1985 miners' strike and the long memory of police undercover operations in former mining communities, surfaces gradually as the investigation deepens.

The series was the BBC's most-acclaimed drama of 2022, winning a BAFTA for Akhtar's supporting performance and the Royal Television Society's Best Drama Series. Graham's combination of murder-mystery procedural with the political archaeology of post-industrial England gave the series a distinctive register that critics widely placed alongside Happy Valley and Line of Duty in the canon of contemporary British prestige drama.