The 15 Best TV Shows Streaming On BritBox

If streaming has provided one net positive for American television audiences, it’s that we no longer have to hunt around aimlessly for the latest TV series from across the pond. ITV and BBC teamed up in 2017 to launch BritBox, a streaming app that now brings users all over the world the best in U.K. television, including their peerlessly grand period dramas, thrilling cerebral crime procedurals, and a whole gaggle of offbeat sitcoms boasting that singular British wit.

HBO Max subscribers got a small taste of what BritBox has to offer earlier this year, but we can imagine scrolling through the streamer’s vast library of content might be daunting for some new users. Fortunately, TVLine has done all the searching for you, finding the 15 best TV shows to start your British (television) invasion off on the right foot. Whether you’re looking for hidden-gem cringe comedies or need to be reminded of a few mega-hits you’ve been meaning to get around to, we’ve got your next binge down below.

Long before Jeremy Allen White began taking us inside the mind of a highly trained and highly stressed executive chef on Hulu’s “The Bear,” the BBC produced its own comedy-drama series about the unexpectedly chaotic world of restaurant service. The key difference between the two is that while White’s Carmen Berzatto is still fired up to achieve perfection, Roland White of “Whites” is too burnt out to care anymore.

Alan Davies stars as the titular executive chef in this sleek, witty sitcom, which combines the look and feel of “The Bear” with the humor of high-stakes industry comedies like “Entourage.” Matt King (who co-created the series with Oliver Lansley) based much of the series on his time working at Hanbury Manor, a historic luxury country house and hotel that resembles the demanding White House Hotel, where the series is set. Like many chefs King says he encountered over the years, Roland leads his team with barely passable enthusiasm or effectiveness, more interested in the petty personal issues of his cooks than in trying to achieve culinary greatness.

Surely the reputation of “Downton Abbey” precedes the series by now. Originally premiering in 2010, the definitive upstairs-downstairs drama of the modern TV era became a global cultural phenomenon when it hit the States. The series wrapped up in 2015 after six seasons and 52 episodes and thereafter released a trilogy of well-received sequel films, the last of which brought the “Downton Abbey” saga to a close in 2025.

Set in Northern England in the early 20th century, “Downton Abbey” centers around the affluent Crawley family and those who work for them at their palatial ancestral estate. The story initially follows a rather conventional plot of sudden succession, in which the middle-class Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) learns that, through a series of misfortunes and an unexpected tragedy, he is to be the heir to Downton Abbey. As the series progresses — and real, historical events unfold around them — viewers are taken through an epic, sweeping tale of romance, tragedy, and inspiring resilience that can entrance almost anyone with its transportive setting.

Perhaps the most disturbing yet darkly arresting series you’ll find on BritBox, “The Fall” is a crime thriller with a unique twist on the serial killer subgenre. Gillian Anderson stars as Detective Stella Gibson, a brilliant, calculating investigator who becomes consumed with uncovering the identity of a strangler stalking and murdering young women in Northern Ireland. While she closely follows the trail of this killer, horrified by each illuminating discovery, viewers are actually several steps ahead of her investigation — in fact, they already know the killer all too well.

“The Fall” simultaneously follows Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan), a handsome, affable, and apparently loving father and husband who hides a double life as a compulsive murderer; his methods and psychology are loosely inspired by Dennis Rader, aka the BTK Killer. His ability to hide in plain sight as a plausibly respectable man is part of the terror that drives the tension of Gibson’s search, but it also serves to complicate an otherwise familiar cat-and-mouse story psychologically. “The Fall” ended after three seasons in 2016, but both Anderson and series creator Allan Cubitt have expressed an interest in exploring Gibson’s story in further installments.

Readers looking for a more straightforward British police procedural will be more than happy with “Happy Valley,” an ironically named series that’s about as dour as they come. Created by Sally Wainwright, it centers on Sarah Lancashire’s Catherine Cawood, a beleaguered police sergeant working in Calder Valley, dealing with a perfect storm of personal issues and traumas (as she so handily summarizes to a perpetrator in the series premiere).

The Valley is depicted in the first season as beset by a pervasive addiction crisis that touches Catherine’s life personally: Her older sister Clare (Siobhan Finneran), with whom she lives, is recovering from an addiction to heroin. In addition to aiding in Clare’s recovery, Catherine must also raise her grandson in the aftermath of her daughter’s tragic death by suicide. Catherine blames her death on the child’s father, Tommy Lee Royce (James Norton), a criminal who assaulted Catherine’s daughter before being sent to prison for unrelated offenses.

Suffice it to say, “Happy Valley” is an emotionally taxing show from the moment it begins — and we haven’t even gotten to the horrific kidnapping plot that forces Catherine to confront her hardships head-on. But in spite of how dark it gets, Wainwright and Lancashire root the show with a defiant humanity that keeps it not just surprisingly watchable, but deeply moving.

Given how beloved anthology series like “The Twilight Zone,” “Black Mirror,” and, to a lesser extent, “Love, Death, and Robots” are in the U.S., it’s always seemed a shame that “Inside No. 9” never gained a meaningful following outside the U.K. — especially since its greatest episodes easily rival those of any of the three aforementioned series.

One reason for the show’s difficulty in building a global audience could be its varying and often unpinnable tone. Some episodes like “The Bill” or the series’ opener “Sardines” lean more comedic, almost like longer versions of stories you’d see on a sketch program. Other episodes like “Wise Owl” or “Cold Comfort” are downright unsettling, or even beautifully tragic like “The 12 Days of Christine.” Creators Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith (who also write and star in most episodes) never let the audience feel comfortable about where they’ll go next, which is precisely what makes “Inside No. 9” a high-water mark for the anthology subgenre.

On BritBox, you’ll find there are plenty of cult television series your friends have surely been pestering you to give a chance for years. Few have a fanbase as righteously passionate as “The IT Crowd.”

This late-2000s sitcom is often regarded as one of the best the U.K. has ever produced, lauded for its absurd and unabashedly silly sense of humor as well as the performances of its ensemble cast — themselves the “it” crowd of British comedic actors. Chris O’Dowd, Richard Ayoade, and Katherine Parkinson star as the largely useless IT department at a hilariously vague company. Their ability to solve the queries of clients in distress exists on a sliding scale that essentially runs in direct opposition to their behaving like normal humans. Other popular British comics like Matt Berry, Noel Fielding, and Chris Morris also appear frequently throughout.

“The IT Crowd” ran for four seasons, ending with a special in 2013. An American remake starring Ayoade, future “Community” star Joel McHale, and Jessica St. Clair was commissioned by NBC (the network having found success with another adaptation of a hit U.K. sitcom we’ll discuss further down), but the show never made it to air.

In a wide line-up of top-notch crime procedurals on BritBox, “Life on Mars” is undoubtedly the most unique. In 1973, Sam Tyler (John Simm) is a detective ahead of his time — literally and figuratively. Due to a traumatic event he can neither explain nor understand when the series begins, Sam was seemingly sent back in time more than 30 years. As he tries to formulate a plan to return to his life as a detective in 2006, he quickly realizes that he needs to understand the nature of the reality he’s presently trapped in.

Throughout the two-season series, the audience follows Sam as he tries to unravel this mystery while applying his modern crimefighting knowledge to cases from the past. It’s a twisty, existentially unsettling riff on a tested genre that subverts expectations with both its plot and themes. For readers who find that “Life on Mars” is exactly the kind of show missing from their American TV diet, BritBox is also streaming the sequel series “Ashes to Ashes,” which uses a similar but separate setting to explore the overarching time travel mystery even further.

We’re certain many of our readers enjoyed Jed Mercurio’s excellent Netflix series “Bodyguard,” a political thriller starring “Game of Thrones” alum Richard Madden that’s so bingeable one could easily watch the entire thing in a day. If that program captivated you as much as it did us, then Mercurio’s early work “Line of Duty” should be right at the top of your watchlist.

Arguably one of the best contemporary British crime dramas produced by the BBC, “Line of Duty” takes the familiar police procedural format and aims its focus squarely on the officers themselves. Each season follows a case of extraordinary police misconduct and/or institutional corruption that must be carefully investigated by a fictional anti-corruption police task force. The audience sees this tense side of the police force largely through the fresh eyes of Martin Compston’s Steve Arnott, a police sergeant who breaks rank with his fellow officers after a mistaken police raid results in the murder of an innocent person. He is thus recruited to the task force and sent to investigate suspected corrupt chief inspector Tony Gates (“The Walking Dead” alum Lennie James).

There’s just something inescapably arresting about watching a pathologically obsessed detective on the case, a classic trope no series pursues as relentlessly as “Luther.” This acclaimed crime thriller series leads with a powerhouse star performance from Idris Elba, whose emotionally exhaustive turn as the titular inspector John Luther ranks among the actor’s best work.

When the series begins, Luther is already on the brink of total mental collapse, having become so overwhelmed by the constant, inhumane violence and cruelty he witnesses at the hands of his targets at the Serious Crime Unit (a police task force that exclusively deals with the most horrible open cases available) that he nearly kills a suspected serial murderer. Though he is allowed to return after a forced sabbatical, his first case puts him on a collision course with the deadly Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson), a brilliant criminal mastermind (and one of the best villains on TV) whose obsessive nature rivals, and indeed seems to fuel, that of Luther.

All five seasons of “Luther” are currently available to stream on BritBox. However, those looking for the 2023 feature film “Luther: The Fallen Sun” can find it on Netflix.

The world likely wouldn’t have most of the best cringe comedy television shows without the pioneering work of “The Office.” As most readers are likely aware, the massively popular NBC series starring Steve Carell, John Krasinski, and Rainn Wilson was originally based on a British television series of the same name created by comedians Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

Though the comedy of the British version skews much darker, the settings and characters will still be amusingly familiar to those who’ve seen the American reboot. General manager David Brent (Gervais) is a more odious and unlikable version of Carell’s Michael Scott, while future “Sherlock” star Martin Freeman and Mackenzie Crook (“Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Game of Thrones”) establish the hostile Jim-Dwight (rather, Tim-Gareth) dynamic that drove much of the comedy in the U.S. series. And, of course, the setting is the stale office of a regional paper company (in this case, Wernham Hogg) that is inexplicably being filmed for a documentary.

The series ran for just two seasons, which, without spoiling anything, end on a surprisingly bleak note that may jar anyone who found themselves getting into a familiar “Office” groove through the shows’ similarities. However, the cast reunited a year later for a two-part Christmas special in 2003, which finds that middle ground between cringe and sweetness that went on to make the U.S. “Office” a standout sitcom in the States.

The “friends living together in an apartment in [insert major city here]” subgenre of television sitcoms has been exhausted, to say the least. And yet, we’re confident in stating that you haven’t seen it all if you haven’t indulged in “Peep Show.”

Created by Andrew O’Connor, Sam Bain, and Jesse Armstrong (the future creator-showrunner of one of the greatest TV dramas of all time in “Succession”), “Peep Show” stars comedy duo David Mitchell and Robert Webb as delusional young men living together in what is essentially a toxic relationship that oscillates between codependent and subtly abusive. Both are at separate dead ends in their lives — one an aimless, unemployed “musician” with zero professional or creative prospects, the other a narcissistic pencil-pusher who basically believes himself above achievement — and using each other to fill the void.

In addition to the singular comedic voices of Mitchell, Webb, and their collaborators, “Peep Show” is notable for its unique filming style, telling the story exclusively through POV camera shots alternating between characters.

It wouldn’t be terribly hyperbolic to suggest that there might not be a BritBox at all if it weren’t for “Sherlock.” Along with the modern iteration of “Doctor Who” (a series which is sadly not available on the streamer), “Downton Abbey,” and, to some extent, “The Office,” this stylish, modernized update of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s enduring mystery novels played a massive role in popularizing British television in America at the dawn of the streaming age.

In addition to turning a generation of Tumblr users into BBC aficionados, the series also launched leading actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman to global stardom (their status solidified by roles in the Marvel and “The Hobbit” movie franchises). If you’re reading this article, it’s likely you’ve already seen “Sherlock” — though fans might as well revisit the first four seasons anyway, given that we’ll likely never see a fifth.

Even if American readers have yet to see “Stath Lets Flats,” there’s a solid chance they’d recognize creator, writer, and star Jamie Demetriou. He had a small but memorable role in “Fleabag” as “Bus Rodent,” and later starred in the Apple TV comedy-mystery series “The Afterparty.” Moviegoers might also recognize him from “Barbie” and “Paddington 2.” This is all to say that, while Demetriou has made a career as a carefully dosed character actor, he’s something of a revelation as the star of his own show.

Playing apartment real estate agent Stath Charalambos, Demetriou operates with a chaotic charisma that nearly masks how terrible Stath is at his job — and pretty much everything else for that matter, most especially dealing with people in a personal or professional capacity. It’s a masterclass in British cringe comedy that gives even David Brent a run for his money.

Though it isn’t commonly considered among the best workplace sitcoms of all time, “The Thick of It” could debatably be a deceptive frontrunner for the top spot. That is, if one would consider the innermost halls and offices of the British government a traditional workplace.

A predecessor of sorts to “Veep,” which was one of the best American TV series of the past decade, “The Thick of It” is a bleakly amusing satire that will cause viewers to laugh as much as they groan in despair over its similarities to the chaos of contemporary world politics. Created by Armando Iannucci (and boasting an all-star writing staff that includes Jesse Armstrong and future “Slow Horses” creator Will Smith), the series satirizes the dysfunction and cynicism of government through the operations of the fictional Department of Social Affairs, a public-facing outfit subject to constant scrutiny — all of which is handled by the ruthless and almost artistically profane communications director Malcolm Tucker (the Twelfth Doctor himself, Peter Capaldi). 

American readers apprehensive about the cultural gap could ease into the story through “In the Loop,” a brilliant standalone spin-off film that sees Tucker in the States, helping the U.S. government spin the narrative around the invasion of Iraq.

There’s no better or, dare we say, more responsible place for us to leave our readers than in the capable comedic hands of Matt Berry. A living legend on British television, he’s given us such irreplaceable performances as Douglas in the aforementioned “The IT Crowd,” the dual roles of Dr. Lucien Sanchez and actor Todd Rivers on “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace,” and, of course, the vivacious vampire Laszlo Cravensworth on “What We Do in the Shadows.” Even in such an impressive body of work, however, “Toast of London” stands out as his career-defining project.

Berry stars in this acclaimed 2010s sitcom (which he also co-created alongside Arthur Mathews) as Steven Toast, the quintessential declining actor hilariously in denial about his own irrelevance. As such, he spends most of his time tending to his own insecurities, pestering uninterested women, feuding with his equally ridiculous nemesis Ray Purchase (Harry Peacock), and squandering what few career opportunities he does get by publicly humiliating himself.