The Fall

Allan Cubitt's The Fall launched on BBC Two in May 2013 and ran for three seasons through October 2016, totalling seventeen episodes. Cubitt (a longtime British television writer behind Prime Suspect 2, Anna Karenina and The Hanging Gale) wrote every episode of the run and directed all of seasons two and three personally. The first season was directed by Jakob Verbruggen, the Belgian director who would later make The Alienist and Black Mirror episodes.

The cast pairs Gillian Anderson (three years before The X-Files revival) with Jamie Dornan, then in his first major lead role; Dornan was cast in Fifty Shades of Grey partly on the strength of his work here, with the casting decision made before the second series of The Fall aired. Supporting cast includes John Lynch, Bronagh Waugh, Niamh McGrady, Stuart Graham and the late Colin Morgan.

The production was filmed almost entirely on location in Belfast and across Northern Ireland, one of the most sustained Northern Irish-set British productions of its era and a significant local employer in the period when Game of Thrones was also filming in the territory. The show is widely cited in academic studies of contemporary serial-killer narratives in British television and was the first BBC drama series to surpass two million online iPlayer requests per episode at the time of its first season's release. Anderson's performance reset the conventions of the British female-led police procedural for the better part of a decade.