More than a year after it was pulled off Paramount Plus, a mystery drama starring Jodie Whittaker is returning to UK screens.
A month after it aired in Australia, the series One Night was made available to UK viewers in November 2024.
The six-part series followed friends Tess (Jodie), Simone (Nicole da Silva) and Hat (Yael Stone), whose lives have been changed by ‘the traumatic events of one night in their hometown twenty years previously’.
It was teased of the show: ‘One Night is the story of three women whose bond was all but destroyed by the traumatic events of one night 20 years ago.
‘Since then, Simone has harboured secret hopes of becoming a novelist but most of her haphazard attempts have been shoved into her bottom drawer. Now, at the age of 40, she has finally written the one story she could never get out of her mind, and her debut manuscript has become an unexpected overnight success.
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‘But it soon becomes apparent that the devastating story the book tells doesn’t exclusively belong to her. At the heart of Simone’s novel is a tragedy which also happened to Tess (Jodie Whittaker) and Hat (Yael Stone), her two childhood best friends.
‘As it becomes harder to prise fact from fiction, one person’s memory and story from another’s, the book threatens to derail all their friendships, bringing old traumas to the surface of the small coastal community where they grew up, and stirring its perpetrators, who want to make it all go away.’
Despite it being labelled a ‘very solid crime drama’ by critics, One Night suddenly disappeared from Paramount after just three months.
It was explained at the time that this was due to the platform reportedly shifts towards a focus on Hollywood-style content with mass appeal and wider cost-savings efforts.
However, ITV has now announced it will be bringing the show back and allowing viewers to tune in again – or for the first time.
One Night will now stream in full from Saturday August 16 and will also air that night on ITV1.
At the time of its release, The Guardian wrote the following about One Night: ‘The overall effect is very much of an Australian Big Little Lies – a female-centred story played out mostly amongst affluent people in shiny clothes and shinier houses.’
‘With strong performances and a diverse cast, it demands attention — but its biggest triumph may just be in the conversations it sparks after its watched,’ The London Evening Standard shared.
‘The show might have benefitted from unspooling its central narrative over fewer episodes because after the halfway mark the drama becomes less character-driven, skating into crime mystery territory. But the acting throughout One Night is incredible,’ The Age added.
One Night was the first TV role since playing the first female Doctor for Jodie.
Reflecting on what drew her to the project, the 41-year-old actress explained that the drama depicted a story about sexual assault in a way that felt ‘completely unique’ to her.
‘What made this completely unique to me and completely engrossing was the change of POV [point of view],’ she told Metro.
‘Very often it’s told from outside in – there’s an investigation, there’s detectives, there’s people working things out. This is about the decimation something like that can have.
‘It’s also about how the event – whether it happened a minute ago or 20 years ago – is defining for a group of women that it affects, particularly this friendship group. But also what it’s about is how we all survive something like that and who owns memory, who has the right to tell stories, and especially if that story is true.’
One Night was created and written by the award-winning Emily Ballou (The Slap, Taboo) and directed by Catherine Millar (The Twelve, The Secrets She Keeps) and Lisa Matthews (Doctor Doctor).
It also stars Kat Stewart, George Mason, Erroll Shand, Noni Hazlehurst, Tina Bursill (Doctor Doctor), William Zappa, Damien Strouthos and Jillian Nguyen.
One Night is streaming on ITVX from Saturday August 16. It will air that night at 9.30pm on ITV1.
A version of this article was originally published on February 5, 2024.
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