If you’ve been desperately hunting for your next crime obsession amid the endless scroll of streaming queues and Sunday-night slots, stop everything—your search ends here, in the fog-shrouded valleys of England’s Peak District, where a brand-new four-part detective drama has erupted onto Channel 5 like a storm breaking over the moors, gripping viewers with its slow-burn dread, razor-sharp twists, and a detective duo so dynamically mismatched they feel like they’ve stepped straight out of a fever dream. Cooper & Fry, which premiered on Tuesday, November 18, 2025, at 8 p.m. and has since rocketed to the top of the UK’s TV ratings with over 3.2 million viewers for its debut episode, is the series everyone’s losing their minds over right now—a chilling, atmospheric hunt through landscapes full of secrets, dead ends, and quietly terrifying suspects that has fans declaring it “a breath of fresh air,” “the best mystery series in years,” and “the kind of binge that ruins your sleep but saves your soul.” Based on the gripping novels of Stephen Booth, the show pairs Doctor Who‘s Mandip Gill as the guarded urban transplant DS Diane Fry with Downton Abbey‘s Robert James-Collier as the affable local DC Ben Cooper, their razor-sharp chemistry crackling like static on a wire, propelling a narrative where every shadowed glen hides a grudge, every quaint village harbors a horror, and the final reveal in each self-contained case lands like a soul-freezing gut punch. In a TV landscape clogged with glossy forensics and quippy quorums, Cooper & Fry emerges as a dark, addictive thriller that’s equal parts pastoral poetry and psychological peril, the kind you’ll devour in one feverish night, only to wake up questioning every neighbor’s smile—because if you crave dark countryside mysteries, slow-burn dread, and detectives with real emotional depth, this is your next obsession, the series that’s already rewriting the rules of British crime drama with every mist-shrouded episode.

From the opening frames of that first episode—airing as a taut, two-hour feature-length installment that feels like a novel condensed into a nightmare—the series seizes you by the throat and doesn’t let go, plunging you into the mist-veiled majesty of Derbyshire’s Peak District, a landscape Booth has masterfully mythologized in his 20-book Cooper & Fry saga since Black Dog exploded onto shelves in 2000. The camera, wielded with brooding brilliance by cinematographer Suzie Lavelle (Killing Eve, Vigil), sweeps over craggy tors and serpentine dales where ancient stone walls snake like veins through the earth, the golden hour light bleeding into twilight gloom that mirrors the moral murk of the cases unfolding. It’s not just scenery; it’s a character, this unforgiving Eden of emerald hills and hidden hollows, where the wind howls like a witness too terrified to speak, and every babbling brook could be whispering clues to the unspeakable. Adapted by screenwriter Joe Barton (The Ritual, Pieces of Her), the series draws from four of Booth’s early novels—Black Dog, Dying to Sin, Blind to the Bones, and Dancing with the Virgins—weaving them into standalone episodes that build an overarching arc of partnership and personal unraveling, each case a mosaic tile in the detectives’ evolving tapestry of trust and turmoil. Episode one kicks off with a gut-wrenching discovery: the body of a teenage girl unearthed in a remote cave, her limbs arranged in a ritualistic tableau that evokes pagan rites long buried under Christian crosses, a crime that drags Cooper and Fry into a web of rural folklore, family feuds, and a suspect pool where every farmer’s handshake hides a harvest of hate. As the investigation deepens, the show’s signature slow-burn dread takes hold—the kind that simmers like fog rolling in off the moors, building to explosive revelations that leave you gasping, heart hammering, convinced that the killer isn’t just in the village, but woven into its very soil.

At the heart of this atmospheric alchemy are Mandip Gill and Robert James-Collier, a pairing so pitch-perfect in their polarity that their first on-screen clash feels like the Big Bang of buddy-cop dynamics, a collision of worlds that sparks the series’ electric tension and propels its addictive pull. Gill, stepping seamlessly from the TARDIS as the fierce, family-first Yasmin Khan in Doctor Who (2018-2022) to the steely, secretive DS Diane Fry, embodies the outsider with a coiled intensity that’s equal parts vulnerability and venom—her Fry is a Leeds transplant mysteriously reassigned to Edendale’s rural CID after a shadowy incident in the city, her sharp suits and sharper tongue a stark contrast to the tweed-and-wellies world she crashes into. Gill’s performance is a revelation, her expressive eyes—those windows to a woman haunted by half-buried horrors—flashing from forensic focus to fleeting fragility in scenes where Fry pores over crime-scene photos by lamplight, her fingers tracing the victim’s wounds as if mapping her own scars. “Fry doesn’t trust the countryside,” Gill told Radio Times in a pre-premiere interview, her voice laced with wry insight. “It’s too quiet, too close—everyone knows your sins before you commit them. Playing her felt like slipping into a skin that’s too tight, every breath a reminder of what she’s running from.” Opposing her is James-Collier’s DC Ben Cooper, the affable Edendale everyman whose boyish charm and encyclopedic knowledge of local lore make him the perfect foil to Fry’s frost—fresh off scheming his way through Downton Abbey‘s opulent halls as the sly Thomas Barrow (2010-2015, plus films through 2025’s The Grand Finale), James-Collier sheds the period polish for a rumpled raincoat and a disarming grin, his Cooper a product of the Peaks, raised on hill walks and harvest suppers, his easy rapport with suspects masking a deeper disillusionment with the job’s toll. Their chemistry is razor-sharp from the jump: in episode one’s interrogation room standoff, where Fry’s urban edge clashes with Cooper’s folksy finesse over a suspect’s alibi, the air crackles with unspoken stakes, James-Collier’s warm baritone grounding Gill’s clipped cadence in a verbal tango that’s as thrilling as any chase scene. “Ben sees the poetry in the Peaks—the beauty in the brutality,” James-Collier shared on The Graham Norton Show post-premiere, his eyes lighting with the thrill of reinvention. “Working with Mandip was magic; she’s got this fire that pulls you in, makes you question everything. Their partnership isn’t fireworks—it’s a slow fuse, burning toward something explosive.” Together, they navigate the series’ emotional depth with a nuance that elevates Cooper & Fry beyond procedural proceduralism—Fry’s guarded glances betraying a backstory of burnout and betrayal, Cooper’s quiet crises hinting at a personal loss that echoes the cases’ ghosts—turning each episode into a character study wrapped in a whodunit, where the real mystery is how two souls so disparate can forge a bond as unbreakable as the gritstone tors.

The cases themselves are a masterstroke of Booth’s brooding brilliance brought to visceral life, each two-hour episode a self-contained nightmare that peels back the Peak District’s picturesque facade to reveal the rot beneath, blending ritualistic horror with rural realism in a way that has viewers double-locking their doors long after the credits roll. Episode one, drawn from Black Dog (2000, Booth’s award-winning debut that snagged the Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel), opens with a helicopter’s frantic whir over mist-choked moors, spotlighting the corpse of 15-year-old Laura Vernon, her body twisted in a pagan pose amid ancient standing stones, a black dog silhouette etched in blood on the cave wall—a nod to local folklore that chills to the bone and sets Cooper and Fry on a trail of pagan revivals, family vendettas, and a suspect who’s as much myth as man. The investigation unfolds like a hike through fog: dead ends in derelict farms where sheep bleat like accusatory choruses, interrogations in rain-lashed pubs where locals close ranks like thorny hedgerows, and a mid-episode twist that flips the ritual from superstition to calculated cruelty, landing with a reveal so soul-freezing it prompted a collective gasp audible on Twitter during live-tweet parties. “That black dog scene? I had to pause and brew tea to recover,” tweeted @PeakDistrictSleuth, her post amassing 8,000 likes in hours. Episode two, mining Dying to Sin (2007), drags the duo into a derelict village swallowed by the earth, where a skeleton unearthed in a sinkhole whispers of sins long buried—sins that mirror Fry’s own urban ghosts, forcing her to confront a past case gone catastrophically wrong, her guarded facade cracking in a rain-soaked confrontation with Cooper that bleeds vulnerability into the violence. Blind to the Bones (2003) in episode three unearths a mining family’s century-old grudge, the bones of colliery dead rising like vengeful specters in a disused shaft, while Dancing with the Virgins (2001) closes the arc with a moorland massacre tied to ancient fertility rites, the virgins’ dance a macabre waltz of betrayal that culminates in a finale so twist-laden it has fans rewatching for clues, declaring on forums like Reddit’s r/BritishTV that “Booth’s books were gold, but this adaptation is platinum—every shadow hides a shiv.” The series’ structure—feature-length episodes blending procedural punch with serialized soul—mirrors Booth’s novels, where cases aren’t just puzzles but portals into the human heart’s darker chambers, the Peaks’ beauty a beguiling mask for the malice that festers in isolation’s embrace.

What truly catapults Cooper & Fry into must-binge territory is its unflinching emotional depth, a rarity in the genre where detectives often serve as stoic ciphers rather than shattered souls—Gill’s Fry, for instance, isn’t the archetypal ice queen but a woman iced by her own inferno, her transfer from Leeds a self-imposed exile after a botched op that cost a colleague’s life, her nights haunted by half-remembered screams that bleed into the cases’ cries. In a standout episode two monologue, delivered in a derelict chapel’s flickering candlelight, Fry confesses to Cooper over lukewarm tea: “The city taught me to run toward the fire; the moors make me want to hide from it,” her voice breaking on the admission, Gill’s performance a tour de force of restrained rage that peels back layers of loss and longing, earning her early buzz for a BAFTA nod. James-Collier’s Cooper counters with a grounded grace, his affable exterior—cracking dad jokes over crime-scene sketches, charming suspects with pints and pub lore—belieing a quiet unraveling from a recent breakup that echoes the isolation of his rural roots, his vulnerability surfacing in poignant pub-side chats where the Peaks’ vastness mirrors his inner void. Their friendship’s forge is the series’ slow-burn soul: from episode one’s prickly pairing—Fry dismissing Cooper’s local intuition as “folksy fluff,” him retorting her city cynicism as “paranoid piffle”—to episode four’s forged alliance, where they share a stakeout vigil that blooms into banter laced with breakthrough, the duo’s evolution a masterclass in character chemistry that has viewers shipping them harder than a forensic report. “Their dynamic is everything—oil and water turning to whisky and wisdom,” raved The Guardian‘s Lucy Mangan in her five-star review, praising how “Gill and James-Collier make the mismatched magic, turning procedural partners into profound pals.”

The supporting cast adds atmospheric heft, each role a brushstroke in Booth’s brooding canvas: Siobhán Finneran (Happy Valley) as the no-nonsense DI Alice DI Paul Hitchens, a station chief whose gruff exterior guards a graveyard of regrets; Barry O’Connor (Outlander, Game of Thrones) as the world-weary DS Gavin Todd, whose rural savvy saves the day in a nail-biting moorland pursuit; Niamh McCann as the enigmatic Tracey Garnett, a local liaison whose loyalties shift like shifting sands; and a parade of guest suspects—from a pagan-priest farmer (Ralph Ineson, The Witch) to a grieving widow with a whisper of witchcraft (Suranne Jones, Vigil)—who flesh out the Peaks’ peculiar populace with performances that ping between pathos and peril. Filmed largely in Ireland’s Wicklow Mountains (standing in for Derbyshire’s dales, with Dublin doubling as Edendale’s bustling base) during a misty summer 2025 shoot, the production captures the locale’s lurking menace: fog that swallows screams, paths that lead to precipices, pubs where pint glasses clink like handcuffs. Director Tom Shankland (Whitechapel, The Missing) helms the first two episodes with a visual vocabulary that’s visceral and veiled—handheld cams chasing suspects through bracken, wide shots of tors towering like silent judges—while Jesse Quinones (The Salisbury Poisonings) takes the reins for three and four, amping the intimacy with close-quarters claustrophobia that mirrors the detectives’ deepening doubts.

Viewers are already spiraling into a frenzy that’s propelling Cooper & Fry to binge-worthy bliss, with episode one’s 3.2 million viewers (a 25% uptick from Channel 5’s average drama slot) spiking to 4.1 million for the second installment on November 25, social media ablaze with live-tweets that trend #CooperAndFryUK nationwide. “Chilling from the first fog-shrouded frame—Gill and James-Collier are genius, the Peaks feel alive and lethal,” gushed @MoorlandMystery on X, her post retweeted 12,000 times. Reddit’s r/BritishTV subreddit exploded with 5,000-upvote threads dissecting the black dog symbolism (“Is it folklore or Fry’s PTSD manifesting? Mind blown!”), while TikTok’s #PeakDistrictPuzzle challenge has users recreating crime scenes with fog machines and fake blood, amassing 10 million views. Critics are equally enraptured: The Telegraph‘s Anita Singh awarded five stars for its “soul-freezing twists that thaw into tender truths,” hailing the finale’s reveal as “a gut-wrench that lingers like moorland mist.” The Independent calls it “a breath of fresh air in a stale genre, Gill’s guarded grit and James-Collier’s grounded grace making every dead end feel alive with possibility.” Even international outlets are buzzing: Variety praises its “exportable allure—think Broadchurch with more moors, less melancholy,” positioning it for a PBS Masterpiece pickup in 2026. The show’s slow-burn success mirrors Booth’s books, which have sold over 3 million copies worldwide since 2000, their rural realism resonating in an urban-saturated era—now, with the adaptation, sales have surged 150% on Amazon UK, fans flocking to the Peaks for “murder tourism” hikes.

As episode three looms on December 2—teasing a colliery catastrophe that buries secrets deeper than the dead—Cooper & Fry isn’t just taking over TV; it’s redefining it, a dark, addictive elixir for mystery mavens weary of whodunits without the why. In a world of flashy forensics and forgettable faces, this series breathes life into the shadows, its detectives not saviors but survivors, their partnership a fragile flame flickering against the Peaks’ encroaching night. Tune in Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on Channel 5 (or catch up on My5), but beware: once you wander into Booth’s world with Gill and James-Collier as your guides, the moors’ mysteries might follow you home, whispering long after the credits fade. If dark countryside chills and detectives with depth are your drug, Cooper & Fry is your dealer—addictive, atmospheric, and utterly unmissable. The hunt is on; will you solve it before the finale freezes your soul?