The Victim starring Line of Duty’s Kelly Macdonald had landed on Netflix. Originally airing on BBC One back in 2019, the miniseries follows the trial of a woman accused of conspiring to murder a man suspected of killing her son 15 years earlier.
After a post accuses Craig Myers (James Harkness) of being a child killer known as Eddie J Turner, he is fatally attacked, with Macdonald’s Anna Dean suspected of sharing the identity of the man she believes killed her child.
All four episodes of the courtroom drama have now been added to Netflix, where it has already shot up the charts – currently sitting at the number seven spot in the Top 10 series in the UK.
STV/Mark Mainz//BBC
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The Victim earned a near-perfect 92% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 12 reviews, The Hollywood Reporter writing in their review: “What looks like an ordinary mystery has a truly impressive depth and level of intellectual agility to it.”
After watching the first episode Decider suggested it could be “four hours of taut drama”, while The Age called it “an emotionally and morally complex study of pain, rage, regret and forgiveness that captures and holds attention until its stunning final scenes”.
“It is a drama that resonates with its time by asking what constitutes a victim and how much leeway we allow in bestowing that status,” added The Guardian. “Do they have to be perfect? How sure do we have to be? And what happens when the perpetrator becomes a victim too, of a different kind?”
Meanwhile, the London Evening Standard called the series “tense” with “plenty of plot to hook you in”, further praising Macdonald, who “doesn’t miss a beat as the hardened Dean”.
BBC
Executive producer Sarah Brown previously explained how the series will “polarise” audiences as it “delves into the grey areas around justice and the law”, further noting “the difference between moral justice and legal justice and that murky thing which the courts don’t really deal with, that the people involved in are having to deal with day to day”.
“As a piece of TV, we wanted to create something compelling for the audience and provoke them into thinking about the issues and delving into those ethically grey areas,” she added. “We didn’t want generic twisty turns, we wanted to ask some difficult big questions about the subject matter of the show.”
The Victim is streaming now on Netflix.
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Sam is a freelance reporter and sub-editor who has a particular interest in movies, TV and music. After completing a journalism Masters at City University, London, Sam joined Digital Spy as a reporter, and has also freelanced for publications such as NME and Screen International. Â Sam, who also has a degree in Film, can wax lyrical about everything from Lord of the Rings to Love Is Blind, and is equally in his element crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every ‘i’ as a sub-editor.