In the premiere of Down Cemetery Road, a desperate woman walks into a private investigator’s office. “Let me guess,” says the detective, Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson). “You’ve got a husband. He’s got a secretary. Am I warm?” She is not. Neither a film noir femme fatale nor a jealous housewife, Sarah Trafford (Ruth Wilson) has come to Oxford Investigations for help in solving a mystery that has little to do with her own life. Her initially inexplicable obsession sets the tone for Apple TV’s unusually humane conspiracy thriller, which premieres on Oct. 29.
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An art conservator who’d prefer to be immersed in detail work, Sarah is bombing as the host of a dinner party where her entrepreneur husband (Tom Riley) hopes to impress an obnoxious prospective investor (Tom Goodman-Hill) when a literal explosive goes off in her neighborhood. Firefighters whisper about a gas main as a little girl, Dinah, is carried out of the wreckage—the sole survivor of a blast that killed her mom. But when Sarah goes to the hospital to drop off a card for Dinah, she’s turned away by weirdly hostile staffers. The child is conspicuously absent from news coverage of the explosion; she even appears to have been edited out of one photo.
The more time we spend with Sarah, a protagonist endowed by Wilson with a compelling mix of brilliance, righteousness, repression, and neurosis, the more we believe that she’s the kind of person who’d put her comfortable, middle-class life on the line to rescue a 5-year-old stranger. Tough and sardonic, with a touch of dissipated glamor and a strained relationship to her sweet, nerdy husband and business partner, Joe (Adam Godley), Zoë is skeptical of Sarah at first. But she soon has reason to join the search for Dinah. Some of the villains they encounter, in what turns out to be something far more sinister than a missing-persons case, are fascinatingly conflicted; others read as manifestations of pure evil.
The least convincing aspect of the show is the conspiracy itself, which seems oversimplified for a scandal of its magnitude. Yet the characters are so richly drawn and the plot twists—at least one bombshell per episode—so captivating, it’s hard to blame writer Morwenna Banks for emphasizing those elements instead. Banks has also written for Slow Horses, an acclaimed, Emmy-anointed Apple spy thriller that, like Down Cemetery Road, is based on a series of novels by Mick Herron. The shows share a preoccupation with the heroic potential of oddballs and burnouts, one that has kept Horses galloping for five seasons (and two more are in the works). Here’s hoping that this cast of outsiders has just as many adventures ahead of it.