Dennis Kelly's six part drama 'Waiting for the Out' begins with Josh Finan's academic Dan Stewer fretting over a cooker in his kitchen.
He obsessively checks the dials, its flame heads and oven for any sign of a gas leak over and over again before eventually leaving the house.
However he's about to enter a pressure cooker of a different kind as he embarks on a new job teaching philosophy to inmates in a prison.
His students include Tom Moutchi's Tom 'Junior' Kouame Jr, Charlie Rix's Zach Colton, Nima Taleghani's Malik Zahir, Sule Rimi's Sansom Blake, Steve Meo's Dan 'Macca' McKenzie, Josef Alton's sensitive Greg Turner and Alex Fairns' bright Keith McKellar.
Attempting to simplify the philosophical concepts of John Locke and Descartes, Dan is taken to task for doing so by Keith.
Inviting each prisoner to talk, most of them relate the theories he teaches to their own lives and reveal real struggleswith their past.
However so does Dan.
His brother, Stephen Wight's Lee Gifford is a recovering drug addict who has gone clean and is in the throes of being a first time dad.
Lee has also served time and both of them have a shared trauma of an emotionally abusive criminal father, played by Gerard Kearns, who bullied them as kids and their mother Gail, played by Samantha Spiro and Flora Spencer-Longhurst, before eventually abandoning the family.
Their uncle Phil Daniels' Frank Gifford, another ex con who flits in and out of their lives, loathes his own brother.
Yet throughout the miniseries, Dan is obsessed by his father, wanting and als not wanting to know his whereabouts - ping pinging between both desires.
Dan even occasionally hallucinates sightings of his dad.
Gail, Lee and Frank are concerned about this obsession and warn Dan about potentially letting his abusive father back into their lives.
But will he listen?
Kelly and his fellow writers Levi David Adai and Ric Renton serve up a compelling and convincing exploration of the impact of childhood trauma and toxic masculinity on people in later life.
Their adaptation of Andy West's 'The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Learning To Be Free' is so impressive that I cannot recall any other drama that has depicted obsessive compulsive disorder and the invasive thoughts that come with it so accurately.
Dan isn't just the prisoner of his past but is the prisoner of obsession - whether it is repeatedly checking his gas cooker, wanting to switch off unused plug sockets, checking and re-checking messages on the smartphone that he is not allowed to bring into jail or fretting over whether to track down his father.
It impinges on his relationships not just with his family but also a tentative romance with Jude Mack's Jessica Atherton and his job, with him falling foul of Ronke Adekoluejo's Officer Stephens.
As a result, every episode of the show is a bit of a tightrope walk and you start to fear Dan may tumble.
Josh Finan is sensational in the lead, seizing his opportunity to head up a drama with one of the smartest small screen performances in a British terrestrial TV show for many years.
Playing a softly spoken, troubled, nice guy, he engages our sympathies by casting Dan as an outsider not just in his job but within his own family and friendship circle.
He is complemented by superb supporting performances by Wight, Spiro, Mack, Daniels, Adekoluejo, Moutchi, Rix, Taleghani, Rimi, Alton, Fairns and Kearns.
Intelligently directed by Jeanette Nordahl and Ben Palmer, 'Waiting for the Out' feels tonally like the BBC's superb NHS drama 'This Is Going To Hurt' and thematically like Netflix's much garlanded show 'Adolescence'.
It really is in both those shows' league.
So what are you waiting for?
This is the first important TV drama of 2026. Watch it.
('Waiting for the Out' was broadcast on BBC1 from January 3-February 7, 2026 and is currently available for streaming in the UK on the iPlayer)
At the start of a New Year we have become used to Netflix inflicting a glossy new Harlan Coben miniseries on us.
Usually packed with famous British acting faces and Richard Armitage, we've had to endure in recent years 'The Stranger,' 'Stay Close' and 'Fool Me Once'.
So it says an awful lot when the biggest surprise of his latest Netflix epic 'Run Away' is that there's no Richard Armitage.
James Nesbitt returnd, though, to Coben's world after his stint in 'Stay Close,' once again cornering the market in "flawed dad desperately searching for his kid" roles in this adaptation of a 2019 mystery novel by the author.
Translated for the screen by Danny Brocklehurst, Tom Farrelly, Amanda Duke and Charlotte Coben, it's a typically muddled tale which sees Nesbitt's financier Simon Greene running around Lancashire looking agitated as he tries to track down Elle de Lange's university dropout Paige Greene.
Spotting her busking in a park, Simon loses his cool when her drug addicted boyfriend Thomas Flynn's Aaron Corval intervenes and tries to prevent him from coaxing her home.
This incident results in Simon becoming a social media pariah after he punches the living daylights out of Aaron with smartphone footage depicting their altercation as 'rich arsehole picks on homeless man's.
When Aaron is found murdered in the grotty apartment he shares with Paige, the most tunnel visioned detectives in England, Alfred Enoch's DS Isaac Fagbenle and Amy Gledhill's DC Ruby Todd pursue just one line of enquiry - they believe Simon is to blame.
This annoys Simon no end as they don't really seem to be all that interested in tracking down Paige, so he takes matters into his own hands along with his wife, Minnie Driver's Ingrid by going along to the murder scene.
There they encounter Lucian Msamati's Cornelius Faber, a neighbour of their daughter's who tried to take her under his wing.
Following Cornelius's advice they go to see the estate's local drug kingpin, Marcus Fraser's Rocco but when Ingrid is shot at the rendezvous and is left fighting for her life, it draws Simon more heat from the cops.
But what has Aaron's murder and Paige's disappearance got to do with two assassins, Jon Pointing's Ash and Maeve Courtier-Lilley's Dee Dee who are also on a murderous rampage?
And is there also a connection with a missing person's case that Ruth Jones' private eye Elena Ravenscroft is pursuing with the help of her tech savvy mother in law, Annette Badland's Lou?
'Run Away' is the kind of thriller that fans of 'Hollyoaks' would think is gritty.
It's all gloss and no substance.
Characters utter bland dialogue and there are several plot twists that just stretch credulity as the miniseries hops between murder investigations, social media outrage and missing person cases to abuse in the care system and a religious cult.
Coben and Brocklehurt's latest farce has the least convincing cop duo since 'Holmes and Yoyo' were on our screens.
Plotlines are initiated and then casually discarded.
The show's killers underwhelm and it has a plot that is just one big so what.
James Nesbitt does that highly stressed face he seems to be doing an awful lot in dramas these days.
Ruth Jones looks like she's wandered in to the wrong show by accident and kind of goes through the motions.
Minnie Driver spends much of her time getting paid while lying in a hospital bed supposedly in a coma - nice work if you can get it.
Pointing, who was so so good in the Channel 4 sitcom 'Big Boys,' is so so disappointing, while Courtier-Lilley overacts.
Enoch and Gledhill make an early pitch to be 2026's most irritating TV duo - the former spending a lot of his time either staring into police photo boards or vainly wandering around his bedroom in his boxer shprts.
de Lange and her onscreen siblings, Adrian Greensmith and Ellie Henry seem to be under the impression they're in a couple of 'Tracy Beaker' episodes, while Lucien Msamati and Marcus Fraser sleepwalk through proceedings.
Geraldine James, Tracy Ann Oberman, Joe McGann and Finty Williams also turn in jaded performances in supporting roles that are so thinly written.
Nimer Rashed directs a show that lacks credibility and is four times the length it needs to be.
Its twists are so incredulous, the audience just doesn't care.
It's so poor, watching two episodes of 'Run Away' feels like a chore.
More alarmingly, it may even have you hankering for the days when Richard Armitage was a Netflix god.
The horror... The horror...
('Run Away' was made available for streaming on Netflix on January 1, 2026)
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