Down Cemetery Road: Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson are superb in thriller from Slow Horses writer

If you only hear the topline premise for Down Cemetery Road, you’d probably flick right past this surprising series.

How many more shows, you will ask while simultaneously rolling your eyes, do we need that start off with the mystery of a missing girl from a quiet/close-knit/seemingly safe community?

Suburban secrets, unhappy marriages and dark histories in middle-class milieux, usually adapted from some best-selling mass market book with an indistinguishable cover that you can buy in Kmart or at the airport.

Been there, done that, no thank you.

Thank god Down Cemetery Road isn’t just another entry in an oversaturated sub-genre, despite the uninspiring sell.

The first sign this British streaming show was more than middling was that Emma Thompson is involved. The second is that Ruth Wilson is her co-star.

The third is that while it was adapted from a book, it’s from a Mick Herron tome, and he wrote all the Slough House novels that became Slow Horses, and we all love Slow Horses. The show was even developed by a writer, Morwenna Banks, who worked on Slow Horses.

It’s all adding up to something you’ll want to watch!

This is a great show with an unusual tone that, like Slow Horses, generously peppers wry humour between the drama and thriller elements. It keeps things moving along without ever getting bogged down in capital E emotions.

Wilson plays Sarah Tucker, an art conservator married to a toadying corporate city guy. They live in Oxford, near a bohemian enclave. One night, while hosting dinner for an obnoxious rich couple her husband is trying to woo an investment out of, there’s a nearby explosion.

A couple of blocks away, an old house has blown up, killing a couple, but their young daughter miraculously survived thanks to a Rube Goldergian set of circumstances. The next day, when Sarah stops by the hospital to pass on a get well card from one of the neighbour kids, she’s rebuffed.

The tetchy and defensive hospital staff refuse to give her any information, the police reference a flagged file and Sarah notices a man following her as she zips around the university town on her bike.

She chances upon the private investigator office of Zoe Boehm (Thompson) and her husband (Adam Godley), who she hires to locate the missing girl, and discover why there seems to be some sort of cover-up involving the explosion.

Down Cemetery Road doesn’t play coy with what’s going on, and makes it clear from the start that the explosion wasn’t from some accidental gas leak. There is a conspiracy afoot and it goes up the chain to the ministry of defence, where the two people trying to keep a lid on it, C (Darren Boyd) and Hamza (Adeel Akhtar), aren’t patient about town locals sticking their nose in it.

The story with its various twists, turns, subplots and reveals is quite compelling, as the puzzle pieces fall in over its eight episodes.

But the real appeal of Down Cemetery Road are Thompson and Wilson, especially when they’re interacting with each other.

Thompson’s Zoe, who is the focus of four Herron books, is caustic and doesn’t take care to not offend people. She has a prickly relationship with her sweet - and a little bit useless - husband, and it’s to Thompson’s great credit that despite Zoe’s abrasive words, there are other layers to the character.

No matter the project, no matter the role, Thompson rarely puts a foot wrong. There is something about her screen presence that demands your fealty. Here it’s the combination of tough exterior, righteous fury and Zoe’s inner vulnerability.

It helps that offscreen, she is so authentically herself, and doesn’t hold back from, for example, telling AI tools to “f—k off” on Stephen Colbert’s show. So, the default starting position for any Thompson performance tends to be that you want to like it. She makes it easy.

Wilson too is a great actor, and someone who has endeared herself to audiences via Luther, The Affair and His Dark Materials. She once played her own real-life grandmother in a three-part miniseries, telling the story of how, as a widow, she discovered her dead husband was a spy.

Sarah is a character you could so easily find every bit the annoying, nosy local gummying up the works. But there is something about Sarah that pushes her to take the next step, open the door she shouldn’t, and it’s that grit and playfulness Wilson brings which makes her a plucky hero you want to follow.

When that mix of compulsive storytelling and two commanding performances from its female leads, Down Cemetery Road is a winner.

Down Cemetery Road is on Apple TV with new episodes weekly on Wednesdays