The leading trend in British mystery shows — and let’s stipulate that British mysteries are the best in the world — has been a blend of slick style and sardonic attitude: “Killing Eve,” “Slow Horses,” “Black Doves.” When the approach clicks, it can be exhilarating; when it doesn’t, it can be tiresome.
“The Gold,” a heist story premiering Sunday on PBS, bucks the trend, and its straight-ahead, old-fashioned vibe is refreshing. It harks back, in a distant way, to hard-boiled British gangster films like “Get Carter” and “Villain,” offering a whiff of that kind of grit and atmosphere. A Michael Caine or a Terence Stamp would fit right into the show’s marvelous cast of no-nonsense character actors.
The show will be familiar to some American viewers — the first six-episode season was available on Paramount+ in 2023, the year it premiered on the BBC. But Paramount+ dropped it and declined to pick up its second season. So PBS has stepped in, broadcasting the first season, now on “Masterpiece,” and promising to show the second season in 2026.
“The Gold” is based on an actual crime at a warehouse near Heathrow Airport in 1983, known as the Brink’s-Mat robbery after the company that ran the facility. Six armed robbers went in expecting to find a million British pounds’ worth of gold and instead found £26 million in bullion and cash, making their haul one of the biggest on record. (Brink’s-Mat has a hold on the British imagination; a number of documentaries and dramas have revisited it, including a 2022 series, “The Curse,” that took the sardonic approach.)
Much of the throwback feel of “The Gold” comes from its loving, lived-in re-creation of the time period. Neil Forsyth, the show’s creator and writer (he also created the sharp Scottish noir “Guilt”), and the Season 1 directors, Aneil Karia and Lawrence Gough, convincingly render the cold, gray, grasping texture of British life in the early years of the Margaret Thatcher era. The working-class British argot is a major bonus — nicking villains sounds much more exciting than arresting criminals.
“The Gold” is a witty and effective police procedural, tracing the work of a task force set up to identify the various crooks (check) and find the missing gold (oops). It cleverly leads us through the elaborate schemes to move the gold and launder the profits, presenting them first in the bewildering, fragmentary patchwork that confronted the investigators and then in the methodically worked-out picture at which the investigators would eventually arrive.
But Forsyth is also working on a bigger canvas, presenting a broad mosaic of the British class system and the dead hand of tradition and hierarchy. All of the characters, on both sides of the law, are negotiating their places in a society that must change but refuses to change. The transgressions of the various robbers, fences, gangsters, shady lawyers and bent cops are portrayed less as villainy than as industrious striving — they are just trying to move up in the world.
Boyce (Hugh Bonneville), the leader of the task force, tells one of his officers that if it weren’t for people trying to “break out of the lives they’ve been given,” the police wouldn’t have a job. The Thames serves as a symbolic divide, with the police operating from the more proper north side of the river to contain the corruption and violence that well up from the south.
This sociological element occasionally slows things down, as characters deliver speeches or recite anecdotes about childhood poverty and abusive parents. But it can also be poetic. When a goldsmith played by Tom Cullen melts down the first bar of Brink’s-Mat gold in his crude backyard workshop, the scene looks medieval, a nightscape of fire, smoke and chains; along with all the other crooks, he is engaged in alchemy, trying to transmute his everyday life.
Alchemy also fairly describes the work of the large and stellar cast, studded with faces familiar to aficionados of televised British mystery. In addition to Bonneville and Cullen, it includes Jack Lowden of “Slow Horses” as a cocky fence; Daniel Ings as a comically enthusiastic customs agent; and Dorothy Atkinson as a hard-up widow recruited to launder bags of cash. Dominic Cooper is especially good as a lawyer who funnels millions of pounds into the development of what will become London’s Docklands.
The type of true-crime drama “The Gold” represents would usually be made as a mini-series, but the chain of complications and reckonings spinning out from the Brink’s-Mat robbery should easily furnish the second season, which was shown in Britain in June but is not yet available to American reviewers. Forsyth, who takes many liberties with actual characters and events, shaped the story so that the first season ends on a more or less conventional high note. It would be a good trick if he managed that in the second season — the real-life story got only weirder and more violent as it went along.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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