‘After the Flood’ BritBox Premiere Date Set — Why Sophie Rundle Jumped to Do Thriller (VIDEO)

Brace yourself—a flood is coming! TV Insider can exclusively reveal that BritBox‘s dazzling thriller After The Flood will premiere Monday, May 13. The series consists of six episodes, and two episodes will air weekly, starting with the premiere. Watch the trailer above.

Led by Peaky Blinders‘ Sophie Rundle, the crime drama centers on her character, Joanna Marshall, a police officer dedicated to her job who also happens to be pregnant. As seen in the newly released trailer, above, when a devastating flood hits a small England town, it’s not just an environmental crisis that takes center stage—it’s an interpersonal one as well. Thrown into the line of duty, Joanna and her team struggle to save an infant from drowning, succeeding thanks to the help of a mysterious good Samaritan who is later found dead, presumably from the rising waters. What follows is the unspooling of an intricately woven, tantalizing murder mystery as Jo realizes there’s more to the story than a simple rescue gone wrong. The series also stars Lorraine Ashbourne (Bridgerton), Nicholas Gleaves, Matt Stokoe, Tripti Tripuraneni, and Philip Glenister.

“I loved the character,” Rundle told TV Insider exclusively of taking on the role. “For someone like me, in my casting bracket, I do a lot of period dramas. So it was really nice to get a script where she’s jumping into flood water and she’s really determined and she’s kind of reckless.” The actress, whose long line of bold female portrayals include feisty Ada Thorne on Peaky Blinders, lesbian Englishman Ann Walker in HBO‘s Gentleman Jack and intelligent British consul Laura Simmons in BBC’s The Diplomat, says she jumped—literally—at the chance to get her feet wet with After The Flood.

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“I think we’re getting better at it, but seeing our female characters be more active than passive is something I was really excited for,” she says. “I really wanted to be more physical, and I think that’s an appealing part of her as a character: that she’s just totally unfrilly and unfussy and she just mucks in … I think that she has this slightly manic, quite reckless, sort of determination, which was quite unusual. She makes choices that I didn’t necessarily always agree with, and that was quite interesting because you don’t always want to be loving everything that your character does.”

“She’s a public servant. She’s a police officer who believes in serving the community. That’s what she does,” adds writer and creator Mick Ford. While Ford set out to make a climate change story, which he says has been in the works for 15 years, Ford remains adamant that he didn’t set out to write a purely political story. “I always write about families and relationships,” he tells us. “So that takes care of itself, and if there’s the grit around it [like climate change], that allows these dramas to happen.”

While After The Flood has the bones of ITV’s usual police procedurals, Ford promises that the answers are hiding in plain sight—in other words, no over-the-top twists at the eleventh hour. “There’s no red herrings,” he emphasizes. “It’s all there. People can try and guess and they can try and work out what’s going on and all the rest of it, but we worked hard on making it so that everything is seeded in. I’ve written on those shows that do the red herrings and they’re fun to write, but you are treading water sometimes. And I think the viewers feel that as well a bit.”

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After The Flood first premiered in the U.K. earlier this year, and reviews highlighted the series’ riveting storylines, topical content, and stellar cast. With its stateside debut, what do the star and creator hope new audiences take away from their work?

“I think kind of the natural takeaway is this conversation around climate change that we need to start having,” Rundle says. “I think this show is a very clever way of opening up that conversation amongst a great, thrilling murder mystery. And Jo’s pregnancy isn’t a side storyline—it’s fundamental to who she is as we meet her in the story. When you spend six episodes in her company, I hope people come away with, ‘Oh, yeah, if there’s any sort of pregnant woman in my life, maybe I should readjust the way I communicate with her.'”

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For Ford, it’s about that same visibility as told through a successful, well-plotted narrative. “There’s a dilemma that arises at the end, and I hope that makes people think about what they’ve seen and about the problems that are facing the world, which are more than just climate change,” he says. “You know, there are elements to climate change we can do nothing about. But if we do more to just try and make people realize you can, as a community, do things … if I can find a story about characters and relationships where somebody every so often who we really get to love gets angry about something like that, well, maybe someone watching will get angry about it. That’s the best I can hope for.” 

After The Flood, Monday, May 13, BritBox