Forget the frilly frocks and whispered intrigues of your standard Sunday night escapism; Olivia Colman isn’t here to dust off the silverware and call it a day. In Channel 4’s blistering new four-part series Echoes of Ashwood, the Oscar-slaying force of nature – fresh off voicing the maternal menace in Wonka and co-producing the marital mayhem of The Roses – plunges headlong into the suffocating underbelly of 1920s England. Premiering last night to a torrent of five-star raves and instant waterworks, this isn’t just another period piece; it’s a scalpel to the soul of empire, where corsets constrict more than waists, candlelight flickers over buried atrocities, and the ghosts of class warfare rise like smoke from a funeral pyre. Early viewers aren’t just hooked – they’re haunted, dubbing it “devastating,” “impossible to shake,” and Colman’s “most emotionally brutal gut-punch yet.” If prestige drama is your vice, clear your calendar: This slow-simmering masterpiece demands your undivided, Kleenex-clutching attention.

Set against the crumbling grandeur of a fictionalized Northamptonshire estate in the interwar haze of 1924 – the same fog-shrouded era that birthed Downton Abbey‘s upstairs-downstairs tango – Echoes of Ashwood spins a tapestry of tangled legacies that’s as exquisitely tailored as Colman’s period gowns. She inhabits Mrs. Eleanor Hargrove, the iron-fisted matriarch of Ashwood Hall, a widow whose porcelain poise masks a vortex of unspoken grief and ironclad secrets. Eleanor’s world unravels on Mothering Sunday, that deceptively tender holiday of maternal bonds, when her orphaned housemaid Jane Fairchild dares to steal a forbidden afternoon with the neighboring heir, Paul Sheringham. What begins as a clandestine tryst in sun-dappled orchards spirals into a maelstrom of revelations: Illegitimate heirs clawing from the shadows, estate ledgers stained with colonial blood money, and a family crypt that whispers of infanticide and inherited madness.

But this isn’t Bridgerton‘s glossy romps or The Crown‘s regal restraint; showrunner Alice Birch (Lady Macbeth, Succession) and director Eva Husson (Boys) – reuniting from their 2021 film roots – excavate the rot beneath the rose trellises with unflinching ferocity. Colman’s Eleanor isn’t a villain in velvet; she’s a vessel for history’s hemorrhaging wounds, her every tremor-lipped confession a indictment of the empire that built her fortune on the backs of indentured souls from India and the Caribbean. “We polished the silver with ghosts,” she hisses in episode one’s shattering soliloquy, delivered amid a rain-lashed conservatory where potted ferns wilt like forgotten promises. Grief here isn’t genteel – it’s grotesque, manifesting in Eleanor’s compulsive rituals: Burning letters from a lost lover in the dead of night, or tracing phantom fingerprints on a nursery wall where her firstborn daughter vanished into the Thames fog. Power? It’s a poison chalice, doled out in drawing-room daggers that slice across class lines, exposing how the servants’ quarters seethe with the same silenced screams as the salons above.

The ensemble orbits Colman like moths to a gas lamp, each performance a flicker of fractured light. Huisman’s Paul is no rakish rogue but a shell-shocked veteran, his shell-shocked eyes betraying the Battle of the Somme’s indelible scars as he grapples with an arranged marriage that reeks of dynastic desperation. Butterworth’s Jane, orphaned by a factory blaze in Manchester’s slums, embodies the era’s invisible inferno – her stolen literacy a quiet insurrection against the Hargroves’ illiterate empire. Supporting turns amplify the ache: Glenda Jackson, in a swan-song cameo as Eleanor’s spectral mother-in-law, delivers venomous valedictions from her invalid’s bed; while newcomer Samuel Anderson as the butler-with-a-secret channels a coiled rage that erupts in episode three’s barn-burning confrontation, a scene so visceral it’s been meme’d as “the period punch-out of the decade.” Even the production design – all fogged fenlands and foxed fox-hunts, scored by a haunting cello drone from Hildur Guðnadóttir (Joker) – conspires to claustrophobia, turning bucolic beauty into a beautiful trap.

Critics and early screeners are unanimous: This is Colman unchained, a performance that eclipses even her feral ferocity in The Favourite or the quiet carnage of The Lost Daughter. “Olivia doesn’t act grief; she exhales it,” raved The Guardian’s four-star dispatch, praising how she “rips the polished surface off history, exposing the raw, ugly truth underneath – class as cannibalism, power as perpetual mourning.” The Telegraph called it “devastating,” a “slow, suffocating beautifully acted story that sits on your chest long after the credits roll,” while Variety hailed episode two’s dinner-party implosion as “unmissable Emmy bait.” Social media’s ablaze: #EchoesOfAshwood trended UK-top overnight, with fans posting tear-streaked selfies captioned “Colman just broke me – send gin” or “This makes Succession look like a tea party.” One viral thread from a Downton diehard: “If Fellowes wrote corsets, Birch writes coffins. Uncomfortably close to home in 2025’s inequality inferno.”

What elevates Echoes from exquisite period fare to urgent exorcism? Its unnerving now-ness. Airing amid Britain’s cost-of-living crucifixion and global reckonings on colonial cash, the series doesn’t just costume the past – it indicts the present. Eleanor’s hoarding of “blood sugar” from Bengal plantations mirrors today’s supply-chain sins; Jane’s forbidden love echoes the gig-economy ghosts haunting modern maids. Colman, ever the activist, infused the role with off-script fire: “History’s not a pretty frock; it’s a straitjacket soaked in someone else’s tears,” she told Radio Times in a pre-premiere sit-down, her voice cracking on the cusp of spoilers. At 51 – mother to three, married to playwright Ed Sinclair since 2001, and fresh from The Bear‘s Emmy frenzy – Colman’s no stranger to brutal beauty. From Peep Show‘s tragicomic Sophie to Broadchurch‘s shattered mum, she’s always mined the mundane for marrow-deep pain. Here? It’s operatic, a tour de force that demands BAFTA bows and, whispers say, a Globe sweep come January.

Channel 4, the scrappy sibling to BBC’s behemoth, struck gold with this £12 million gamble – a co-pro with A24 and Film4, greenlit post-Colman’s 2024 Wicked Little Letters word-of-mouth wizardry. Executive producer Damian Jones (The Iron Lady) credits the alchemy to lockdown lock-ins: “Olivia locked us in a Zoom for weeks, channeling her lockdown lows into Eleanor’s endless nights. The result? A drama that feels like therapy – for her, for us.” Streaming now on All 4, it’s already spiked platform traffic 28%, per Nielsen, outpacing even The Serpent Queen‘s campy corsetry.

If you care about prestige drama – the kind that lingers like a lover’s ghost, probing your privileges while polishing your heart – Echoes of Ashwood deserves the throne of your watchlist this week. Pour the sherry, dim the lamps, and brace: Colman’s not just starring; she’s summoning. In a year of silver-screen satires and streaming slogs, this is the raw reckoning we didn’t know we craved – history’s ugly truths, wrapped in velvet, delivered with a dagger. Episode one ends on a cliffhanger that’ll have you doom-scrolling fan theories till dawn. Consider yourself warned: Once you start, the echoes won’t fade. Neither will the ache.