2019 - 2023
Guilt is the BBC Scotland dark comedy-drama that put the channel's drama department on the map when the first series dropped in 2019. Written and created by Neil Forsyth, it ran for three seasons between 2019 and 2023, twelve episodes total, and wrapped as a genuine trilogy rather than a show that got cancelled and called it art. BBC Two picked it up for the UK-wide broadcast, PBS Masterpiece took it for the US, and the critics piled on praise like it was a late Christmas.
The premise is simple enough to fit on a beer mat. Two brothers, Max McCall (Mark Bonnar) and Jake McCall (Jamie Sives), are driving home at night after a family wedding. They hit an old man. They kill him. Rather than call the police, Max, a slick Edinburgh lawyer with every angle figured, talks his passive younger brother into a cover-up. The old man, it turns out, was not a random stranger. The cover-up does not hold. From that one bad decision the brothers are sucked into a widening spiral involving blackmailers, Scottish gangsters led by the terrifying Roy Lynch, an American ex-pat neighbour with her own agenda, and the kind of family history that should have stayed in the attic.
That is the setup. Everything else is what Forsyth does with it.
The whole show is a two-hander between Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives, and without that central chemistry none of it works. Bonnar plays Max as a man with a Rolodex of faces. Charming for clients, scathing for waiters, unreadable for his brother. He can flip through three emotions in half a second and have you believe all of them. It is a career-best turn from an actor who has been quietly brilliant for years in Line of Duty, Unforgotten and Shetland.
Jamie Sives plays Jake as the kicked dog of the pair. Softer, sadder, pushed around his whole life by a brother who thinks of him as a problem to manage. Sives lets Jake be dim without being stupid, decent without being saintly, and that distinction is the show's whole moral engine.
Around them Forsyth builds out an ensemble of Scottish and Irish talent who each get real material to work with.
Emun Elliott
Kenny Burns
Sara Vickers
Tina
Phyllis Logan
Maggie Lynch
Stuart Bowman
Roy Lynch
Neil Forsyth
Creator / Writer
Jamie Sives
Jake McCall
Mark Bonnar
Max McCall
Ellie Haddington
Sheila
Phyllis Logan won Best Actress in Television at the Scottish BAFTAs for this role, and when you watch her you understand why. She does not raise her voice once. She does not need to.
Guilt works as a thriller. It works better as a study of brothers. Underneath the hit-and-run plot is a much older Scottish story about family shame, class ladders, and what happens when the brother who escaped Leith for a career in law comes back and decides his brother who stayed is a liability.
Max is not a villain. He is a man who assumes that because he is cleverer than everyone around him, he is also better. Jake is not a saint. He is a man who has let life happen to him and is about to find out what that costs. Forsyth writes both of them with the specific texture of Scottish middle-class self-deception and Scottish working-class resentment, two tones most UK shows cannot tell apart.
There is also a class comedy buried in the drama. The McCall family has gone from the record shop and the lawyer's office to something more respectable, and the show is brutal about the price of that climb. I will say the class satire hits harder than the thriller beats by the end of series two.
The show looks like Edinburgh and sounds like Edinburgh, and that matters. Forsyth and his directors shoot the city the way Edinburgh locals actually experience it. Leith backstreets, cobbled stair-towers up to Old Town closes, the Shore in the rain, middle-class New Town flats with cornices and hidden damage. No tartan, no military tattoo, no bagpipes over the opening titles. Just a real city being used properly.
The tonal move the show pulls off again and again is the one Fargo made famous. Something horrific happens. A character says something wee and dry about it. You laugh before you catch yourself. The Telegraph called the show "Fargo relocated to Leith" and the label stuck because it is accurate. If you liked the rhythms of Fargo, Guilt will feel like finding a cousin you did not know you had.
The scripts are short. Four episodes per series. No filler, no sag, no subplot that exists because a writers' room had to hit twenty-two. Forsyth is sole writer on nearly every episode and the voice is consistent from minute one to the final scene.
The first series won Best Drama at the Scottish BAFTAs, the Royal Television Society of Scotland Awards, the Celtic Media Festival and the Broadcast Digital Awards. The second series repeated the trick at the Scottish BAFTAs, picking up Best Scripted and Best Writer for Forsyth alongside Phyllis Logan's Best Actress win. The third and final series landed in April 2023 and got a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, with The Times calling it "some of the best writing of the whole show" and The New York Times giving it a "suitably twisty and sardonic send-off."
The New York Times has described Guilt as "Scotland's most notable TV drama," which is a big claim and also the correct one. It was the first drama commission of the newly launched BBC Scotland channel and it basically justified the channel's existence single-handed.
A rare three-season show that ends exactly when it should and keeps its quality right to the last scene.
A lot of prestige dramas pretend to be about something serious and are really about nothing except their own surface. Guilt is the other way round. It pretends to be a dark wee thriller about a cover-up and it is really about two men who have been slowly destroying each other their whole adult lives, and about a country that produces both of them.
Forsyth went on to make The Gold for BBC One straight after this, and if you want a second helping of his writing that is where to go. For tonal neighbours, Kin does the family-in-the-underworld thing on Irish streets rather than Scottish ones, and Bad Sisters has a similar dark-comic pulse around siblings with a secret. If you came up via US crime drama, Your Honor takes the exact same premise (lawyer covers up a hit-and-run involving family) and plays it straight as a prestige tragedy. Ozark is the big-budget cousin for people who like watching ordinary lives get eaten by a criminal world.
Twelve episodes. Three seasons. Zero filler. If you have not watched it yet, start tonight.
Ruth Bradley
Angie Curran
Henry Pettigrew
DC Stevie Malone
Greg McHugh
Teddy McLean