What was the best drama of 2021? Mare of Easttown was brilliant. It’s a Sin was heartbreaking and life-affirming in equal measure. Ten million viewers watched Vigil, and can they all be wrong? (Yes, but we will get to that later.)
Yet, for jaw-dropping, plot-driven, bombshell television, one show was head and shoulders above the rest this year, and it was Oprah with Meghan and Harry.
It adhered to all the rules of great drama: heroes and villains, dark secrets and killer lines – “Were you silent, or were you si-lenced?” And, like all the best stories, it had an unreliable narrator.
That interview led indirectly to the departure of Piers Morgan from Good Morning Britain, and left the BBC at loggerheads with the Palace over its ill-advised decision to investigate Megxit in The Princes and the Press. In an overwhelmingly uninspiring year for television, Meghan proved to be one of the disruptive forces that kept things alive.
The schedules were stuffed with drama series. Plenty started with promise – Baptiste, Hollington Drive, The Long Call – but how many of them held your attention until the end? The flow of detective dramas felt endless, as did the run of domestic thrillers featuring wine-drinking women in peril. Some of them were just plain odd: ITV’s Finding Alice, starring Keeley Hawes in an unholy mash-up of Cold Feet, Grand Designs and something set in a mortuary, was a total misfire. Before We Die and Close to Me, Channel 4’s attempts at mimicking Nordic noir, left us cold.
There was decent stuff here and there, from Welsh murder mystery The Pact (BBC One) to the return of Dalgliesh on Channel 5 and the end of Nicola Walker in ITV’s Unforgotten. Manhunt: The Night Stalker (ITV) took a real-life police investigation and transferred it to the screen with care and restraint. The Serpent (BBC One) went against the grain by starting off so-so and building nail-biting tension with each episode. But great dramas could be counted on one hand.
