It’s safe to say that the third and final series of Sally Wainwright’s Happy Valley, starring Sarah Lancashire and James Norton in its leading role, has set a gold standard for 2023 telly. With the culmination of six week’s edge-of-the-sofa level drama hitting screens this Sunday, there will no doubt be quite the crash back down to earth (and comparatively dull TV) for a lot of us waiting on the other side of the weekend.
Lucky for us there’s absolutely no shortage of mystery/thriller/police-drama-type series’ about, from the old heavy hitters making their way from terrestrial onto streaming sites like Netflix, to mega-bucks productions made especially for online. And while there’s no denying that us Brits do it best, there’s a while load American series to mine that give the Beeb and Channel 4 a run for their money on the high-stakes drama front. Here’s what to watch next if Happy Valley left you with a thirst for thrills.
Line of Duty
Remember the last time a UK crime drama caught the country by storm and utterly dominated social media discourse? As evidenced by the esteemed armchair critics of Gogglebox, the BBC’s Line of Duty is not for the faint of heart and will likely swiftly lead to you forgetting about work, friends and family and devoting every waking thought to who, indeed, H could actually be.
Line of Duty currently has four series available on Netflix to binge and the most recent two are still streaming on iPlayer.
The Deceived
Normal People may have been Paul Mescal’s biggest role to date, shortly after he took on the part of Connell Waldron he starred opposite fellow Irish actor Emmett J Scanlan in The Deceived, a four-part drama about a University student who has an affair with her professor before his wife's death uncovers a slew of secrets.
Anything by Harlan Coben
If you’re a fan of a twisty-turning, potentially slighty spooky thriller, you’d do worse to acquaint yourself with American novelist Harlan Coben. Netflix have acquired the rights to a number of his books and turned them into seriously bingeable series – from Safe to The Stranger and Stay Close in English (maybe he’s a fan of assonance?) and a number of others in Polish, Spanish and French, with cops aplenty
The Accident
Proving her acting chops once again, in The Accident Sarah Lancashire plays woman from an economically declining Welsh industrial village whose community is torn apart when an explosion in a construction site kills a group of local teenagers. As fingers are pointed in the name of blame, the drama follows the convoluted court systems. Originally made for Channel 4, all four episodes are now available to stream on Netflix.
Kiri
Another killer performance by Sarah Lancashire (and proof that absolutely no accent is out of her remit), Kiri follows passionate social worker Miriam Grayson fighting for justice after the murder of a little girl in her care. It also saw the breakout roles for young actors Felecia Mukasa and Finn Bennett.
The Snow Girl
If there’s one thing Netflix’s offering of Happy Valley-esque crime dramas has taught us it’s that we shouldn’t be limiting ourselves to English language series when there’s so much out there from Europe and beyond. The Snow Girl is a Spanish drama that follows a young investigative journalist trying to get the bottom of a missing child case that the police repeatedly mess up.
The Nest
While this has all the twist and turns you’d expect from a gritty crime drama, The Nest, with Sophie Rundle and Martin Compston – not to be confused with the 2020 Jude Law film of the same name – hits especially close to home for those who’ve had fertility struggles. Dan and Emily are a well-off couple so desperate to conceive that they’ll stop at nothing to make their family dreams come true.
Treason
No scrolling socials allowed with this one – if you want to know what’s going on in Treason, the 2022 made for Netflix drama, you’ll have to pay attention. It goes beyond bent coppers to explore the cut throat world of MI6 and Russian espionage, but it’s only available to stream for a limited time so be quick.
Clocking Off
And oldie but a goodie, Clocking Off was a BBC drama that ran from 2000 to 2003, with all four series still available to watch on iPlayer. It was an anthology series, following the home lives of a group of factory workers in Manchester, each of whom has an improbably amount of drama and mystery in their day-to-day lives. Missing persons, arson, fraud and, of course, murder make this a worthy follow-up to Happy Valley (and even features Queen Sarah Lancashire in the first series).
