In a series that sees Emma Thompson at the top of her game, how could I not like Down Cemetery Road? But of course, and in all seriousness, the crime mystery thriller, based on the debut novel of Mick Herron, has so much more going on than Thompson’s fabulous performance. There are well-placed twists and turns, mysterious intrigues, and the show even has a biting wit despite its very dark story.
Down Cemetery Road hails from creator Morwenna Banks, who also wrote for Slow Horses, Apple TV’s other series based on Herron’s novels, but it’s very much its own thing. The crime thriller is like a back-alley maze leading us towards a grim and disturbing government cover-up that is treated with the amount of shock and empathy required for how it hurts certain characters. And what an exciting, nail-biting maze it is.
The series follows Sarah Trafford (Ruth Wilson), an art conservationist in Oxford who witnesses a building exploding from an alleged gas leak near her friend Wigwam (Sinead Matthews) and her partner, Rufus’s (Ken Nwosu), home. It turns out Wigwam knew the woman who died in the building, and she is survived by her daughter, Dinah Singleton (Ivy Quoi), saved from the explosion by a wardrobe. When Sarah goes to deliver a card to Dinah in the hospital, she’s met with a lot of defensiveness and suspicion. But this harmless act of kindness leads Sarah to start digging into the reason Dinah is being hidden away, and she hires a private detective agency — run by Joe Silverman (Adam Godley) and his wife Zoë Boehm (Thompson) — to help.
Nothing is ever rushed or skipped over, and the thrills, while subtle, are all the more stressful thanks to the show’s consistent pacing.
This summary barely brushes the surface of the plot, which is deeper and grows increasingly more concerning by the minute. The beauty of Down Cemetery Road is that it isn’t afraid to separate its main characters for long periods of time before reuniting them again. Sarah and Zoë don’t become best friends, either, which is surprisingly refreshing. They are two people who are thrown into this investigation by circumstance and accident, but whose refusal to back down despite the obvious dangers and threats to their safety is ultimately the show’s driving force.
Down Cemetery Road Knows How To Build Tension Through Its Writing & Characters
With the number of characters the show has to juggle, it would have been easy to drop one or the other in favor of moving things along, but Down Cemetery Road is deliberately paced; each new revelation comes at a perfect moment, and the mystery is never dumped on us in expository scenes. It’s an incredibly and effectively crafted show that keeps us on edge, increasing its tension as the characters learn more about the central mystery. There are layers to it that come into play, so the episodes, which each clock in at around 51 or so minutes long, never drag or struggle to hold our interest.
The series is so good that nothing, not a single scene or moment of dialogue, is wasted. Just when I thought things would go right, they turn left, and the mounting danger means that there are high stakes and fallouts from the decisions the characters make. From the extremely detail-oriented viciousness of Amos Crane (Fehinti Balogun), whose higher-ups want a clean kill job, to the blubbering, nervous semi-incompetence of handler Hamza Malik (Adeel Akhtar), every character is well-utilized, playing parts that only add to the building suspense.
Down Cemetery Road is not a show you want to turn away from. It’s constantly throwing us for a loop, playing with our assumptions before revealing the truth. There’s an episode that ends on such a harrowing cliffhanger, and the expectation that the opening moments of the following episode would comfort us about a character’s fate is thrown out the window as the show teases us. But the reveals aren’t empty, either, and the writers take their time laying things out so that the payoff is earned.
It helps that Thompson and Wilson are exceptional leads. Thompson’s delivery of her character’s blistering dialogue is wonderful. Not even Zoë, she’s very straight to the point. She doesn’t hold anyone’s hand, not even Sarah’s, even if that means struggling with her own personal grief and guilt alone. Zoë is always on the move, and Thompson plays up her sense of jitteriness and need to be nowhere for long. Her wit is acerbic, and I couldn’t imagine anyone else playing Zoë besides Thompson, who truly brings a serious absurdity to everything.
Wilson’s Sarah is not as ruthless in her approach to, well, everything, but she’s still headstrong and stubborn about finding out what happened to Dinah and, crucially, the reason behind the explosion. In some ways, it’s a distraction from her life and husband, Mark (Tom Riley), who seems to see Sarah as a nuisance, but it’s also her desire for the truth, especially after encountering prevalent social class distinctions, that drives her. Remarkably, Sarah is not a journalist, and one of her best attributes is how normal of a middle-class woman she is. Wilson imbues her with a sense of dread and curiosity, fear and nothing-to-lose gumption.
The supporting cast — namely Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Downey and Balogun, whose eyes and body language do so much to instill fear — is also stellar. The way they interact with each other in this game of cat and mouse is especially magnetic. Whether it’s Downey lurking around corners, seemingly following Sarah, or Tom Goodman-Hill’s Gerard’s greasy and haughty elitist attitude towards Sarah and her friends, there’s never a scene in which these interactions lose steam or intrigue.
Between the fantastic and tightly written scripts to the tension-building and suspense, Down Cemetery Road is a series you won’t want to miss. It’s exciting, daunting, and intentionally executed. The cast is superb, and the mystery heightens the intensity that permeates the series from the start. Nothing is ever rushed or skipped over, and the thrills, while subtle, are all the more stressful thanks to the show’s consistent pacing. All of this to say that once you start watching the Apple TV series, you won’t want to stop.
The first two episodes of Down Cemetery Road are now available to stream on Apple TV+, with new episodes airing weekly each Wednesday.
- Release Date
- October 29, 2025
- NETWORKS
- Apple TV+
- Showrunner
- Carlton Cuse, Ryan J. Condal
- Directors
- Natalie Bailey
- Writers
- Morwenna Banks
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