My wife and I watch a lot of British television. We’re huge fans of what they call panel shows, which are basically game shows with comedians. But we also love a good British mystery or crime drama. We subscribe to BritBox, a British streaming service that provides loads of stuff. Some of it is good, some of it is garbage. 

The difficulty is that I don’t see commercials for British television; I don’t know anyone or follow anyone on social media that regularly talks about British television. So I have no idea what’s good or what’s not.

Mudtown is pretty good.

Clare Lewis Jones (Erin Richards) is a volunteer magistrate in Newport, Wales.  I don’t even know what that means. I guess they hear low-level court cases and make decisions like a judge, but maybe not on major crimes. English law is weird.

Anyway, she’s good at her job. But she’s got a dark past. When she was young, she ran around with a guy now known as ‘Saint Pete’ Burton (Tom Cullen), who saved her neck back then. Now he runs drugs and is an up-and-comer in the criminal community. She’s got a husband and two kids. The oldest, Beca (Lauren Morais), has started dating Sonny Higgins (Lloyd Meredith), who is Saint Pete’s right-hand man. 

One night Beca is at a party with her high school chums at some old abandoned warehouse. Someone starts a fire that just so happens to burn up a bunch of Saint Pete’s money that he had stashed in the warehouse. Later, one of the kids finds himself shot.

Most of the show involves Saint Pete trying to find out who started the fire and Clare trying to keep Beca out of trouble. There is a lot of family drama (between Clare and her husband and daughter, and Saint Pete and his crew). 

The acting is good, the cinematography is great, and the story mostly worked for me. We recently watched a couple of shows where the characters made absolutely stupid decisions, and I was thrilled that for most of this one they actually seemed relatively intelligent.  It gets a little dumb by the final episode, but mostly this worked for me.

I especially appreciated how they played with the whole my kids in trouble trope. A lot of shows will put a kid into trouble, and they don’t actually care that much about the kid.  It is just a plot point to drive our heroes into action. But here Beca is a real character, and they do some interesting things with her.

I’m definitely hoping for a season two.