If you’ve already binged The Diplomat, it’s time to rewatch State of Play

By now, you’ve probably finished bingeing The Diplomat season two. It was just too delicious to sample and snack.

As with anything that is devoured rather than savoured, it leaves you wanting more. With that jaw-dropping cliffhanger and a third season at least a year away, how are you going to satiate that appetite for a pacy political conspiracy thriller? Preferably one that’s at least Westminster-adjacent.

Enter: State of Play.

State of Play is a BBC miniseries from 2003 you’ve probably already seen but likely haven’t thought about in two decades – except for when the Americans remade it in 2009 as a fine but not dazzling movie starring Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck.

Twenty-one years is a good break if you haven’t rewatched it — it’s just enough time to forget the granular details of how the conspiracy unfolded and, if you’re lucky, who did it.

Created and written by Paul Abbott (Shameless) and directed by David Yates (four Harry Potter movies), it’s a compulsive puzzler with twists and double twists, crusading characters, those with plenty to hide and flawed decisions, all marinating in a soup that suggests corruption at the highest echelons of political and corporate power.

What more could you want?

The action kicks off with the murder of a young man, chased down and shot by a hard-eyed assassin, who then puts a bullet through a passing motorcyclist who had the misfortune of riding past at exactly the wrong moment.

The next moment, Stephen Collins (David Morrissey), a promising MP, is on the Tube when his train is held because someone has died falling on the tracks.

These two seemingly unrelated deaths both land on the news at The Herald. The cops, prejudicially, chalk up the murdered black kid, Kelvin Stagg, to gang violence, while the other is Sonia Baker, a researcher for Collins, who is initially thought to have suicided.

Chief reporter Cal McCaffrey (John Simm) and his colleague Della Smith (Kelly Macdonald) catch the Stagg story while political reporters Helen Preger (Amelia Bullmore) and Pete Cheng (Benedict Wong) are assigned Baker’s death. Not surprisingly, the two are connected.

There’s a call between Stagg and Baker the day before their deaths – and nothing explains how they might have crossed paths.

Of course, there is one man whose fate is inextricably linked to all this and that’s Collins, who was having an affair with Baker and was preparing to leave his wife Anne (Polly Walker) and their children.

Collins also happens to be old university friends with Cal and crashes in his spare room after being hounded by paps. There’s an interesting exploration of how an old friendship buttresses and exploits – both ways – a journalist and his subject. Especially when those personal bonds are further complicated by, well, that would be a spoiler.

But, mostly, State of Play is a gripping process story of how these journalists, which also includes editor Cameron Foster (Bill Nighy) and hungry young reporter Dan (James McAvoy), uncover a vast conspiracy.

They do the work, they chase down leads, photocopy paper and transcribe conversations, interrogate people, try to manage others, have a thorny relationship with police, and fight with their lawyers.

There are one or two story beats that defy realism. Far too many guns are drawn and there’s at least one unnecessary punch but, hey, it’s TV

There are a couple of loose ends or unanswered questions but on the whole, it’s a satisfying denouement, and there’s one particular line that a political character says that definitely elicits a “damn, straight!”.

State of Play is exactly the kind of obsessive thriller where anything could happen, anyone could be behind it and then, ultimately, logic prevails.

Like All the President’s Men, The Post, Spotlight and She Said, State of Play is an investigative journalism story, but it has that distinctly British edge to it. It’s a bit grainier and less earnest — people don’t do as much speechifying about the greater good.

But it absolutely knows a thing or two about a cracking story.

State of Play is streaming on Stan and Britbox