The Way

Over the past year or so I’m sure many of you reading this have enjoyed the likes of Blue Lights, The Responder, Happy Valley and The Way. All huge BBC dramas. They have something else in common – they’re rooted in towns and cities across the UK.

This is no accident. In March 2021, we laid out our “Across the UK” blueprint for the BBC’s biggest transformation in decades, designed to move more of our programming and decision-making across the UK. The goal: to bring us closer to our audiences.

Wales is in flames after a strike at the Port Talbot steelworks spirals out of control, forcing the Driscoll family to flee their home and country. Such is the premise of The Way, by turns doggedly realistic and fantastical, but always highly watchable.

The ambitious three-part BBC One drama, which imagines a civil uprising in Wales, is written by James Graham and marks Michael Sheen’s debut as a TV director. And, unusually, has the creative input of the iconoclastic documentary film-maker Adam Curtis.

The Way

Monday

BBC One, 9.00pm

Good Omens’ Michael Sheen not only stars in and directs The Way, he also co-created it alongside filmmaker Adam Curtis (HyperNormalisation) and screenwriter James Graham (Dear England).

Across three parts, Graham has written an "emotional and darkly humorous" story that taps into the social and political chaos of today by imagining a civil uprising that ripples out from a small industrial town.

Following the uprising, a local family, the Driscolls, are forced to flee their home country and abandon the certainties of their old lives. But, the synopsis asks, "will they be overwhelmed by their memories of the past, or will they lay their ghosts to rest and take the risk of an unknown future?"

The Wales-based producer Red Seam has just begun filming the three-part series in Port Talbot, Wales. Graham wrote the story, which follows an ordinary family, The Driscolls, caught up in a civil uprising that ripples out from their small, industrial hometown of Port Talbot.