This adaptation of the bestselling Australian crime novel is full of twists, turns and red herrings. Its focus on the terrible grief of bereaved mothers makes it a cut above

I hope you have had enough time to recover from Robyn Malcolm’s barnstorming performance as a harrowed wife and mother labouring under burdens no one should have to endure in the acclaimed After the Party, because here comes another one.

The Survivors is a six-part adaptation of Jane Harper’s bestselling Australian crime novel of the same name, by Tony Ayres – who did the same for Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap 10 years ago, which followed families fracturing under the weight of a moment’s lost control, and who co-created Stateless in 2020 about lives intertwining at an Australian immigration detention centre. This is a writer who doesn’t shy away from the pain human beings can inflict on one other. The Survivors is technically a murder mystery but its real subject is grief and terrible, terrible guilt.