Brit TV News Bits: Grantchester, Unforgotten & a New Adaptation of Vanity Fair

Here are a few tidbits about the return of two of Brit TV fans’ favorite series, plus news about the new small-screen adaptation of a classic English novel.

Grantchester

The new season of Grantchester, which is currently in production, will be James Norton’s final season playing vicar and amateur sleuth Rev. Sidney Chambers. Joining the cast is Tom Brittney (Outlander, The Five, Call the Midwife), who will play Rev. Will Davenport, a man of the people and the new crime-solving partner to Robson Green’s DI Geordie Keating. Grantchester: Season 4 will air on PBS Masterpiece Mystery and ITV in 2019.

Unforgotten

Unforgotten is one of the best contemporary mystery series on telly, and the new six-part series finds DCI Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker, The Split) and DI Sunil ‘Sunny’ Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar, The Indian Doctor) delving into another intricate cold case investigation — one in which the body of a teenage girl who went missing at the turn of the millennium is found at a building site off the M1 motorway, and the lives of four men are placed under the spotlight and their relationships are tested to the limit.

Guest stars in Season 3 include Alex Jennings (A Very English Scandal, Victoria, The Crown), Kevin McNally (The ABC Murders, TURN: Washington’s Spies, Designated Survivor), Neil Morrissey (The Good Karma Hospital, Striking Out, Line Of Duty), and James Fleet (The Hollow Crown, Indian Summers, The Vicar Of Dibley), who play a close-knit group of old school friends that have stood by one another through thick and thin.

Unforgotten: Season 3 returns to ITV in 2018, and most likely in 2019 to PBS Masterpiece Mystery. Stay tuned for updates.

Vanity Fair

Adapted from the classic novel of the same name by William Makepeace Thackeray, this limited series stars Olivia Cooke (Bates Motel, The Secret of Crickley Hall) as Becky Sharp. Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, the seven-part drama follows Becky as she tries to claw her way out of poverty and scale the heights of English Society, breaking hearts and losing fortunes as she goes.

Produced by Mammoth Screen and Amazon Studios, the drama’s star-studded cast includes Claudia Jessie (Line of Duty) as Amelia Sedley, Tom Bateman (Da Vinci’s Demons) as Captain Rawdon Crawley, Charlie Rowe (Red Band Society) as George Osborne, Johnny Flynn (Lovesick) as William Dobbin, Martin Clunes (Doc Martin) as Sir Pitt Crawley, Frances de La Tour (Vicious) as Miss Matilda Crawley, Suranne Jones (Doctor Foster) as Miss Pinkerton, and Michael Palin (Remember Me) as Thackeray himself. The drama will will air on ITV in the UK and Prime Video in the US. Stay tuned for updates.

(FYI: If you’re not familiar with the story and aren’t up for reading the lengthy book, you can watch the BBC’s 1987 and 1998 adaptations on Prime Video. And if TV adaptations are your thing, check out these articles: “20 BBC TV Adaptations Now Streaming on Prime Video in the US” and “33 BBC Limited Series Being Made Available on Prime Video.”)