2022 - 2022
Suspicion landed on Apple TV+ in February 2022 and ran for eight episodes across a month, wrapping in late March. One season. No renewal. Apple pulled the plug once it became clear the show was not pulling numbers the way Severance and Slow Horses were pulling numbers in the same window, and it has quietly drifted toward the bottom of the service's catalogue ever since.
The premise is a good one. Katherine Newman, an American media mogul played by Uma Thurman, has her son Leo kidnapped from a New York hotel by masked assailants dressed, for maximum theatrical effect, as the British Royal family. CCTV from the hotel lobby pins the crime on four random British travellers who happened to be staying there the same night. An IT consultant, a data analyst, an Oxford student, a university lecturer. None of them know each other. All of them claim innocence. The FBI, Scotland Yard, and Newman's corporate PR machine proceed to spend four days tearing their lives apart while the kidnappers escalate on a global news feed.
It is adapted from the Israeli series False Flag, which ran on Keshet 12 from 2015 to 2020 and was a genuine hit in its home market. The adaptation is by Chris Long, who also directs most of the run, and Rob Williams. The plot beats are tight. Whether they stick the landing is the question Suspicion spent eight weeks failing to answer to the satisfaction of anyone watching.
Uma Thurman is the headline, making a rare return to series television, and she plays Katherine Newman as a woman who has used decades of public image management to sand every feeling off her face. It is a cold performance by design. Whether that design suits an eight-episode serialised thriller where the audience is supposed to feel the stakes of a kidnapped child is a question you will probably have answered for yourself by episode three.
The real discovery is Kunal Nayyar. Anyone who only knows him as Raj Koothrappali from The Big Bang Theory should watch this purely to see what he can do with a dramatic register. As Aadesh Chopra, a struggling IT consultant whose life is collapsing under the weight of debt and a failing marriage, Nayyar is excellent. Anxious, wounded, proud, and clearly capable of more than the sitcom ever asked of him. His post-Big Bang pivot is one of the best things in the show and frankly one of the reasons it is worth watching at all.
Around him:
Uma Thurman
Katherine Newman
Georgina Campbell
Natalie Thompson
Noah Emmerich
Scott Anderson
Chris Long
Director / Executive Producer
Elizabeth Henstridge
Tara McAllister
Daniel Ings
Kunal Nayyar
Aadesh Chopra
Rob Williams
Creator / Writer
The ensemble is strong. The problem was never the casting.
On paper Suspicion is a kidnap thriller. In practice it is a show about media power and what happens when a single grieving billionaire can weaponise a news network to point at four people and turn them into monsters overnight. Katherine Newman's corporate apparatus is arguably the scariest thing in the series. Scarier than the kidnappers. Scarier than the FBI.
The other thing it is about, and the thing that gives the four-suspect structure its real charge, is how quickly an ordinary life falls apart under the forensic glare of a modern investigation. The show is interested in the gap between what a stranger looks like on paper and what they are actually carrying. Debt. Affairs. Estranged family. An old grudge. The four suspects are all hiding something, which is almost always the case with any four random adults you pluck out of a hotel lobby. None of it necessarily has anything to do with a kidnapping.
The most unsettling sequences are the ones where a suspect's phone is dumped and their worst day is read aloud to a federal investigator. That part works. That part lands.
Chris Long directs most of the run and keeps the look cold and functional. Glass buildings. Grey London interrogation rooms. A lot of CCTV inserts. The cutting between New York and London is slick and the set pieces in the opening two episodes are as good as anything the genre has produced in the last five years. A hotel grab. A car chase through South London. An FBI raid on a suburban home that does not go the way you expect.
The problem is the middle. The show has a good first two episodes, a good last twenty minutes, and roughly four hours of stalled investigation in between where the suspects mostly sit in custody or run from police along parallel storylines that do not quite earn their runtime. Episodes five and six in particular drag, and the reveal of who is actually behind the kidnapping, when it finally comes, lands with a thud rather than a gasp. Critics and audiences said so at the time and the conversation has not softened since.
Suspicion opened to mixed reviews, slid through its middle episodes to worse reviews, and ended with a finale that was broadly panned as underwhelming. Apple quietly declined to renew it. There was no second-season buzz, no cliffhanger the fanbase rallied around, no campaign to save it. It just ended. The show now functions on Apple TV+ as a slightly frustrating recommendation. Worth the first two episodes for the premise and Nayyar's performance. Worth finishing only if you are the kind of viewer who needs to know how things wrap up even when the wrapping is disappointing.
If you want the four-suspects-under-pressure structure done better, go watch The Night Of or Defending Jacob or Mare of Easttown. If you want Apple TV+ thrillers that actually paid off, Slow Horses and The Patient are right there. For international spy and political thriller territory with better finale discipline, Tehran and Hijack both stick their landings where this one does not.
I came close to bailing on Suspicion twice and I am glad I did not, because the thing the show gets right, it gets very right. The first two episodes are a tight, well-directed kidnap-thriller hook. Kunal Nayyar is a genuine revelation in a dramatic role and on its own that is almost reason enough to put the show on. Uma Thurman is doing something interesting with Katherine Newman even if the writing does not always meet her halfway. And the core idea (four strangers flattened by an algorithmic public narrative before they have any chance to defend themselves) is the most timely thing about the series and the thing that sticks after the credits roll on the last episode.
My hunch is that Suspicion would have been a better five-episode limited series than an eight-episode one. There is a sharper, leaner show hiding inside this one, and you can see the outline of it in the opener and the closer. What you get in the middle is a reminder that a clever premise and a strong ensemble are not, by themselves, enough. If you want the hook without the sag, watch episodes one, two, and eight. You will miss surprisingly little and keep the parts that work.
Pete Sullivan
Tom Rhys Harries
Eddie Walker
Angel Coulby
Vanessa Okoye