ITV’s Passenger hopes to be Stranger Things for the North of England

When David Threlfall read the script for ITV's new drama Passenger, he was baffled. “This is good but completely undecipherable,” he told himself. “But it has something.”

In fact, the actor — best known for playing the idiosyncratic Frank Gallagher on Shameless — signed on to Passenger simply because of the talent behind the camera, namely Broadchurch actor Andrew Buchan making his screenwriting debut.

“He must know what he's writing, and they've commissioned this, so there must be something there,” Threlfall tells a conference of journalists. “I had no idea what I was involved with but I knew I was on a good ship sailing with a really great bunch of people.”

Now that the six-part series is finished, and arriving on screens soon, Threlfall can understand its genius. “I don't really watch a lot of TV unless it's football, but it stands there with things like Stranger Things,” he continues.

That Netflix series makes for an apt comparison, at least judging by the first two episodes viewed by Yahoo. Passenger opens with an unknown entity breaking out of a bread delivery van and murdering stags outside a small, fictional Northern town.

On the same night, a local teenager, Katie, goes missing after driving her car into the forest, and her not-boyfriend, who had been unconscious in the back seat, wakes up in bed with blood covering his face and pillow. And just to deepen the mystery, Katie’s disappearance seems linked to a missing Swedish tourist who was visiting the area earlier in the year to see the mystical “Tree of Good Hope”.

Wunmi Mosaku’s police officer Riya is on Katie’s case, while a handful of supporting characters, ranging from Threlfall’s disgruntled fracking site manager to Jo Hartley as a withered constable, fill out the brilliant cast. The result is a series that borrows from American shows but feels unapologetically British.

“Part of my reason for writing the show was growing up around those characters,” Buchan tells Yahoo UK over Zoom. “I grew up in the Northwest in Bolton. And there's a shorthand to the way people act and speak up there and there's a real magic and warmth to the place.

“What I realised was that they seem to have this uncanny ability, in the face of darkness, to flatten it with humour or sarcasm. And it always intrigued me and fascinated me. And so I wanted to create a fictional Northern universe and puncture it with something otherworldly to see how much humour I could detonate.”

When Yahoo mentions Stranger Things and Twin Peaks, Buchan says he was inspired by those shows and adds Fargo, The Outsider, True Detective, and The OA to the list. “Those shows that lure you into a false sense of the familiar and then hit you with something otherworldly,” he says, “those are the shows that entice me.”

The series’ Northern voice intrigued ITV and led the broadcast to commission the show, while production company Sister “enthusiastically” encouraged Buchan to tap into his roots. That, in turn, led to a whole lot of dry comedy… and a whole lot more swearing.

“It felt very grounded in reality, but it was placed in another world,” Hartley, who previously appeared in After Life and This is England, says. “There’s the intrigue and the corruption and the gossip and dishonesty and the camaraderie but also that sarcasm and unpredictability.

“It's like nothing else I've ever been in. And each character could go off and have a show written about them, the way every single character is so full. Andrew has created something quite incredible that I've not seen before on British TV.”

Mosaku (Vera, Loki) adds that getting a script like Passenger is a rarity. “There was just something really special about reading Andy's dialogue,” she says. “I just felt like the story was good, but the dialogue and how the script was written, it felt like it stretched you artistically and rhythmically, and everyone felt individual. It felt theatrical.”

The script wasn’t the only thing special about the series; the cast all agree that being on set was as fun as the scripts. “We all got on really well, partly because it's so ensemble-y, you get to know everyone,” says Mosaku. “I feel like lifelong friends were made on that show.”

Hartley agrees. “The days that I was there, we would have so much fun,” she says. “It would be really funny. And when I watched the show, I was like, ‘I thought it would be funnier!’ It's very funny, but I remember laughing all the time on set. It's a dark, dry, blunt humour. And there's a real wit. And then I watched it again, and I was like, ‘God, this is incredible!’”

Passenger will air on ITV1 at 9pm on Sunday 24 March and Monday 25 March, with two more episodes the following week.

Read more: TV drama

Who's who in ITV Passenger? (9 min read, Evening Standard)

True Detective stars break down shocking finale (12 min read, Yahoo TV UK)

Where was Passenger filmed? (2 min read, Bolton News)