Down Cemetery Road (Apple TV) Series Review

Ruth Wilson, Emma Thompson and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett are flawless in Apple TV’s Down Cemetery Road, is a gripping, binge-worthy series that will empower you and make you braver.

That night, Sarah had been trying her best to dodge the sexist, obnoxious remarks of the Ferrari-driving Gerard Inchon (Tom Goodman-Hill, of Baby Reindeer), a wealthy, conceited businessman whom Mark is hoping to turn into an investor. But just as the protagonist of Down Cemetery Road was about to speak her mind in front of their other guests – Gerard’s wife Paula (Aiysha Hart, of Mogul Mowgli), Sarah’s good friend/neighbor Wigwam (Sinead Matthews), and her juggler husband Rufus (Ken Nwosu, of Black Doves) – a house had exploded on the other side of the road.

“That’s Dinah’s house,” says Wigman’s son Ziggy (Charlie Dean), outside, minutes later, watching the firefighters try to put out the flames. Thankfully, Dinah is alive, but she might be the only survivor of what is soon revealed to have been a gas explosion. Dinah was a classmate of Ziggy’s, but Sarah has her own connection to her too. Speaking with Wigman, the following day, she realizes she had met the young girl the day before, when Dinah had jumped in front of her bike to catch a butterfly. “I saved it”, the child had uttered with a smile, freeing the insect, to which Sarah had responded, “Brave.”

That interaction is the reason why, when Wigman shows Sarah a drawing that Ziggy made for Dinah, Sarah takes it upon herself to deliver it to the child. But when she gets to the hospital, she’s denied access and brusquely invited to leave. Anyone else would have left it at that, but Sarah is driven by a desire for truth she can’t quite explain, but that has defined her entire life. Sensing that something is wrong, she goes to the police, only to find out the file is “flagged” and no one can help. Soon, she realizes no paper has been reporting on the child; it’s as if Dinah had disappeared in plain sight.

As the people around her treat her quest as the unfounded obsession of a neurotic woman with a history of mental health problems, Sarah notices she’s being followed. And so, without really knowing what she’s doing, she enters a random building whose sign reads “Oxford Investigations;” that’s when our story really begins.

Sarah’s actions lead to a chance meeting with unorthodox private investigator Joe Silvermann (Adam Godley, of Succession). But it’s Joe’s wife who eventually takes her case, and it turns Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson, of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, also on producing duties) – a cynical, fearless forty-something woman who wears her leather jacket like an armor, couldn’t care less about rules and expectations, and tends to say exactly what she thinks at all times – is precisely what Sarah needed.

But is Dinah even alive? Why are so many people trying to prevent Sarah from learning the truth? Could something bigger be at play here, and is Gerard Inchon involved in it too? And why was there a gas explosion in a building with no gas? As Down Cemetery Road unfolds, Sarah and Zoë get closer to the truth, each on her own individual journey and each discovering pieces of a puzzle that will only make sense when our protagonists’ paths collide, at the end, and they make the conscious decision to start trusting each other, and their own selves, again.

With only three episodes to go till the series finale, some pieces of the puzzle have been revealed, and you might have an idea of where Down Cemetery Road might be headed. But though the series’ main twist isn’t exactly revolutionary, it’s its clever worldbuilding and well-rounded characters that will bring you that kind of addictive, binge-worthy storytelling that makes you want to start a new episode the moment the previous one ends just so you can spend more time with its protagonists.

Down Cemetery Road is a series that treats its viewers with respect, making us active participants in the mystery by cleverly having us discover some pieces of the puzzle before Sarah and Zoë do. Even more intriguingly, that knowledge still doesn’t help us understand who can be trusted among many characters, most of whom are part of a much bigger plot.

There’s the mysterious man who’s been following Sarah around (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, of Femme), and there’s a dangerous rogue assassin named Amos Crane (Fehinti Balogun, of Dune: Part One). But there are also a powerful government operative named C. (Darren Boyd, of Killing Eve) who has mastered the art of threatening his subordinates in creepily hilarious ways, a well-meaning ‘fixer’ for the British Intelligence who never seems to be able to actually ‘fix’ anything, and even more characters who might not actually be who they say they are.

Getting to the truth matters just as much to Sarah and Zoë as it does to us, but it’s the show’s characters that will keep you watching, and superb acting from all cast members is part of the reason Down Cemetery Road works so well. Unsurprisingly, the standouts are Ruth Wilson and Emma Thompson, who imbue two characters who were already well-rounded and intriguing on paper – the show is adapted from Mick Herron’s bestselling “Zöe Boehm” book series – with such energy and charisma that they always come across like actual human beings. More than that, they feel like the kind of people – and the kind of women – we’d like to be; watching them stand up to anything from stigma and stereotypes to actual life-or-death situations is immensely rewarding, and makes us want to channel them both in our own search for truth.

As one of the most interesting characters in the show, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett is flawless. After delivering impressive turns in Nia DaCosta’s Candyman and Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s Femme – and more recently as one of the leads of “The Importance of Being Earnest” on London’s West End, Stewart-Jarrett continues to prove he’s one of the most talented actors of his generation. In Down Cemetery Road, he will haunt you, intrigue you, surprise you, and even move you to tears, with a raw authenticity that makes his character Downey so fascinating to watch.

As the hilariously sinister C., Darren Boyd is superb. The Spy (2011) star was born to play this role, and though C. is clearly one of the villains here, his inventive insults and absurd conversations deliver some of the best humor in Down Cemetery Road. There’s a point in the show where C. urges poor Hamza to get his “cavalcade back under control” by calmly informing him that he’s “a gnat’s c*ck away from putting this whole business to rest,” ending the conversation with an earnest and heartfelt “Off you f*ck” that had me laughing at the screen for a very long time.

This is the kind of humor that can be found in Down Cemetery Road, and though the situations themselves are absurd and alien, it’s the relatability of all of these characters’ emotions and predicaments that makes it all so familiar. Most of the time, humor is a device to provide clever commentary on our culture, especially in terms of what Zoë and Sarah stand for, and where their journeys eventually lead them.

It’s best if you find out more about that journey on your own, but directors Natalie Bailey, Börkur Sigþórsson, and Samuel Donovan and the show’s team provide us with a journey worth taking. Thanks to clever storytelling that makes us really care about its characters, fantastic acting from Wilson, Thompron, Stewart-Jarrett, Boyd, and everyone involved, and the right combination of humor and tension, Down Cemetery Road is a fantastic adaptation of the “Zöe Boehm” novels, and a binge-worthy series that will have your eyes glued to the screen.

The first five episodes of Down Cemetery Road are now available to stream globally on Apple TV. The rest of the series will be released weekly, with new episodes every Wednesday through December 10, 2025.

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