[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Unforgotten Season 6 finale.]
Six seasons in, British crime drama Unforgotten continues to tell gripping, complex stories. When the killer of brutish husband, father and business proprietor Gerry Cooper was revealed in the Masterpiece series’ Sunday, September 28 finale on PBS, it turned out not to be any of the four persons of interest set up at the start: his wife Juliet (Victoria Hamilton), onetime mistress Melinda (MyAnna Buring), former employee Marty (Maximilian Fairley), and the Afghani translator who had aided some of Gerry’s immigrant tenants, Asif (Elham Ehsas).
It was Gerry’s teenage daughter, Taylor (Pixie Davies), who was responsible for his death, and she hadn’t even realized it because her mother had covered for her. When the girl, 11 years old at the time, saw her mother on the floor and her father striking Juliet with his foot, she grabbed a knife that was on the kitchen table and stabbed him in the leg.
He bled out, but by then Juliet had taken Taylor upstairs, before returning to dismember her husband’s body and dispose of it in the marsh. In the end, police detectives Sunny Khan and Jess James (Sanjeev Bhaskar and Sinéad Keenan) learned that prosecutors opted not to charge either one.
Besides offering a terrific whodunit, Unforgotten creator and executive producer Chris Lang, who has written every episode of the series, wanted to explore the political divide that Britain — and many other countries — are facing through this season’s characters.
“That was my prevailing theme, division,” he tells TV Insider. “I think the left and the right in the U.K. used to be able to rub along fairly amicably, but since Brexit, it’s been really difficult, and it feels like people have entrenched themselves even further in their positions. There’s a sort of straight fault line down the middle that’s more marked, I think, than it’s ever been.”
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Although the characters represented varying political stances — Melinda was a right-wing political commentator; Asif was helping a friend who’d entered the country illegally — viewer response illustrated the divide when Unforgotten aired in Britain earlier this year. Lang’s social media pages lit up with angry comments.
“The greatest challenge was … to not respond in the way that I was advocating we’ve got to stop doing,” Lang says. “We’ve got to start having more restrained conversations. We’ve got to respect each other more. I developed a technique of saying, ‘Well, I’m sorry you feel like that, and I hope you can still enjoy the show in some way.’ I knew it was going to provoke a reaction, but I didn’t think it would be as strong as it was.”
The American political climate even prompted a change in filming locales. Unforgotten‘s American broadcaster, PBS, was defunded by the federal government this summer amid accusations by Republicans and President Trump that PBS has a liberal bias. But concerns about the political ramifications of this season existed even before the 2024 election.
Lang initially planned to set and shoot part of Season 6 in the U.S., but those scenes, which involved Melinda, were rewritten to take place in Ireland (and shot in Wales). “In the end, it was deemed to be too difficult to shoot in America,” he says. “The elections were coming up and … it was a politically sensitive story. There were a lot of difficult subjects addressed, and in the end, it was felt it was probably more expedient to shoot in a country close to home.”
Lang feels not filming in the U.S. was the right decision. “Whatever I’m saying as a writer is really about the U.K. and its environments. When you move out and start maybe commenting on other countries, it becomes a bit more problematic and less welcome,” he says. “The response the show got here was really evidence of how sensitive these more difficult subjects are. I think it would have just been the same in America, and perhaps the pressure is even greater there.”
Unforgotten‘s seventh season is scheduled to start shooting in January.
Unforgotten, Seasons 1-6, PBS app (with Passport) and PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel