The blackout curtains are drawn tight, the air-raid siren has just faded into the distance, and somewhere along the fog-choked promenade of wartime Hastings a woman’s scream is swallowed by the sea. For the first time in twelve years, the unmistakable silhouette of Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle, tall, immaculate, fedora tilted just so, steps out of the shadows and into our living rooms once more. Netflix has quietly, almost reverently, dropped the entire ten-season run of Foyle’s War, the Anthony Horowitz masterpiece that many still whisper is the finest British drama never given its proper crown, and from the very first frame of the newly remastered pilot it is clear that this is not nostalgia served lukewarm. This is a masterwork reborn, sharper, darker, more treacherous than even its most devoted disciples remember.
Because Foyle’s War never truly left us; it simply waited, patient as a sniper in the dunes, for the world to be ready again for stories told with the slow, deliberate precision of a man who can unravel a murder with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and the weight of unspoken moral certainty. And in 2025, when every screen seems to scream for attention with explosions and jump-cuts and superheroes, the return of Michael Kitchen’s quiet, devastating Christopher Foyle feels less like television and more like absolution.
Step carefully, because the Hastings you are about to re-enter is not the postcard seaside town of cream teas and deckchairs. It is a place where every smile hides a secret, every whispered conversation in a darkened pub could be treason, and the war is not raging across the Channel; it is seeping through the cracks of ordinary British lives like damp through plaster. The bombs may fall on London, but the real damage is done in drawing rooms and police stations and lonely cliff-top paths where lovers meet under cover of darkness and leave only footprints and lies behind.
At the centre of it all stands Michael Kitchen’s Foyle, a performance so understated it borders on the miraculous. There is no bombast here, no Poirot theatrics, no Morse melancholy. Just a man in a three-piece suit and perfectly knotted tie who can silence a room simply by removing his hat. Kitchen’s Foyle speaks in complete sentences, rarely raises his voice, and yet every word lands like a verdict. Watch him interrogate a suspect and you will forget to breathe; he doesn’t threaten, he simply waits, patient as winter, until guilt does the talking for him. It is acting of such economy that it feels almost cruel, as though Kitchen has distilled an entire moral universe into the smallest tilt of the head, the briefest flicker of disappointment in those pale blue eyes.
Beside him, radiant and fearless, is Honeysuckle Weeks as Samantha Stewart, Sam to everyone who loves her, the driver, confidante, and moral compass who refuses to be diminished by a world that keeps trying to put women back in their place. Weeks plays Sam with a brightness that could power the entire south coast, yet beneath the breezy smile and perfect lipstick lies a steel backbone and a heart that breaks in perfect silence. Their relationship is never romantic (thank God), but it is one of the great love stories of television nonetheless: two people who understand each other so completely they rarely need words, who protect each other not with grand gestures but with the quiet, daily courage of choosing decency in a world gone mad.
And then there is the war itself, woven so seamlessly into every murder, every missing person, every seemingly domestic crime that you forget where the battlefield ends and the home front begins. Creator Anthony Horowitz (the mind behind Midsomer Murders, Alex Rider, and the Sherlock Holmes novels) never lets you forget the cost. A body on a beach is not just a corpse; it is a son who will never come home. A forged ration book is not petty theft; it is a betrayal of the sacrifices being made in the skies above. A love affair is not mere scandal; it is desertion, cowardice, or espionage wrapped in a kiss. Every episode is a masterclass in moral ambiguity, where the line between right and wrong is drawn in sand and washed away by the tide before you can be sure which side you’re standing on.
The series begins in May 1940, with the fall of France still echoing like a death knell, and follows Foyle month by month through the war’s darkest years. We watch the Battle of Britain rage overhead while a murderer walks free because the victim was “only a conscientious objector.” We see the arrival of American GIs bring chewing gum, jazz, and racial tension that explodes into tragedy on a quiet English lane. We witness the moral corrosion of internment camps, the quiet heroism of codebreakers, the casual cruelty of class, the slow drip of suspicion that turns neighbors into informants. Nothing is ever simple. No one is ever purely good or purely evil. Even the villains are given their moment of humanity, because Horowitz understands that war’s greatest crime is how ordinary it makes monstrosity feel.
And the twists, dear God, the twists. This is not a show that insults your intelligence with red herrings and last-minute revelations. The clues are there from the first scene if you are brave enough to see them, hidden in a glance, a hesitation, the way someone folds a letter or refuses to meet Foyle’s eyes. When the truth finally arrives, it lands not with a gasp but with a slow, dreadful exhale, the realization that you have been looking at the answer all along and simply refused to believe a human being could be capable of such calculated horror.
The supporting cast is a who’s-who of British acting royalty having the time of their lives playing against type. Anthony Howell’s Sergeant Milner, wounded at Dunkirk and struggling to prove his worth with a limp and a heart full of quiet courage. Julian Ovenden’s dashing pilot Andrew Foyle, Christopher’s son, whose charm masks the terror of a boy sent up to die in the skies. And the guest stars, each episode a treasure trove: Charles Dance as a coldly patriotic spymaster, Rosamund Pike as a femme fatale with ice in her veins, Michael Jayston, Ellie Haddington, Corin Redgrave, James McAvoy in one of his earliest roles, all delivering performances so nuanced they could cut glass.
The production itself is a love letter to a Britain that no longer exists. Filmed on location in Hastings, Rye, and the windswept Romney Marsh, every frame drips with atmosphere: the clatter of typewriters in dimly lit police stations, the wail of air-raid sirens slicing through the night, the way cigarette smoke curls like a question mark in the blackout. The costumes are impeccable, the cars gleam with period authenticity, and the score by Jim Parker is a haunting waltz of strings and piano that lingers long after the credits roll.
But what elevates Foyle’s War from brilliant period drama to something接近于神圣 is its refusal to sentimentalise. This is not a cozy mystery where order is always restored by the final reel. This is a portrait of a nation at war with itself, where justice is often the first casualty and decency is a daily act of rebellion. Foyle himself is no crusader; he is a civil servant who believes in the law the way other men believe in God, and every case chips away at that faith just a little more. By the later seasons, as the war ends and the Cold War begins, you can see the toll in the set of his shoulders, the way his silences grow heavier, the way he looks at the world like a man who has seen too much and still chooses to get up every morning and do the right thing anyway.
That is why the return of Foyle’s War to Netflix feels like more than just another binge drop. In a television landscape dominated by caped crusaders and zombie apocalypses, here is a show that dares to be quiet, that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort, that believes moral complexity is more gripping than any car chase. Here is a detective who solves crimes not with fists or flashbacks but with integrity so unflinching it becomes its own kind of superpower.
So dim the lights. Pour a cup of tea, strong, no milk, the way Foyle takes it. And step back into the fog of wartime Hastings, where the darkest crimes are not committed on distant battlefields but in the human heart, and where one man in a perfectly knotted tie still believes that truth, like justice, is worth fighting for, even when no one is watching.
