My Cultural Diet

After his activist daughter is brutally murdered in front of him, police officer Ronald Craven is determined to catch her killer. But when he learns more about his daughter’s association with a radical environmentalist group opposed to nuclear power, he becomes increasingly convinced that her death was no simple murder, much to his superiors’ consternation. When Edge of Darkness premiered on British TV in 1985, it became a massive hit and was widely acclaimed for tapping into the nascent concerns around nuclear power and proliferation. To this day, it’s frequently counted as one of the best British TV series of all time. As a child of the ’80s myself, the series’ nuclear concerns had a certain nostalgic whiff, and I was never not intrigued by its twists and turns, especially once Joe Don Baker’s unorthodox CIA agent made his entrance. But if I’m honest, I kept expecting the series to get a lot weirder than it did (though I could’ve done without the implied subtext in Craven’s relationship with his daughter). Bits and pieces are dropped here and there that hint at something more surreal and perhaps even supernatural, but in the end, the series remains a more conventional political thriller.

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