Dennis Kelly’s brilliant drama about a teacher in prison is moving, gripping and almost painfully vulnerable – plus the main character decimates everyone at a middle-class dinner party. What more could you want?

It’s hard to imagine a better route into true philosophical inquiry than time in prison. Regret, causality, the nature of freedom: these are urgent issues to the incarcerated. Time is both impossibly empty and passing at terrifying speed. You face endless days and nights with only the inside of your head for company. You are at the sharpest end of practical philosophy, whether you like it or not. What is life for? Could it be changed for the better?

Accordingly, the teaching of philosophy in prison is entirely logical. But that depends on who is doing the teaching, and why. This magnificent six-part drama is adapted by Dennis Kelly (with both sitcom romp Pulling and conspiracy epic Utopia on his CV, Kelly is a hard man to predict) from Andy West’s memoir A Life Inside. By becoming a philosophy professor, West – recast here as Dan and brought astonishingly to life by Josh Finan – was escaping his background. But only up to a point. His father, uncle and brother all did time, while he found a different destiny. That didn’t save Andy/Dan from endless, intrusive fantasies that he was doomed to follow them anyway.

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As the writer of conspiracy thriller Utopia and Covid-era relationship drama Together, Dennis Kelly has form for creating darkly perceptive TV drama. This excellent series stars Josh Finan (whose performance in The Responder earned him a Bafta nomination) as Dan, a philosophy teacher with a troubled family past, working in a prison. As he explores issues around freedom, luck and destiny with the inmates, he starts to wonder if he actually belongs behind bars like his abusive father. Soon, his anxieties threaten to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• BBC One, 3 January