Well, here’s a surprise. Rules of the Game, the new BBC thriller miniseries starring Maxine Peak, has premiered in the US.
This past Monday, February 7, Hulu released Rules of the Game on the streaming platform, quietly bringing the BBC thriller to viewers in the US.
The contemporary four-part drama opens with the discovery of a dead body by Sam Thompson (Maxine Peake, Silk, The Village, Shameless), the COO of Fly Dynamic, a family-run sportswear company owned and operated by members of the Jenkins family. And so begins the first mystery in the miniseries, as we are not clued into who the deceased is. For police detective DI Eve Preston (Susan Wokoma, Year of the Rabbit), something is off with the presumed suicide. Preston’s questioning of Sam at the police station, and her request that she “start at the beginning,” prompts a series of flashbacks that take viewers through the events that lead up to the death.
The beginning turns out the be the first day of work for Maya Benshaw (Rakhee Thakrar, The Girl Before, Sex Education) at Fly Dynamic, where she is the new HR director. She is extremely well-meaning and starts her job in earnest, and immediately clashes with Sam, a rather cold and ruthless executive who has been with the company since she was 16 years old. She had felt compelled to hire Maya in order to have a woman in a senior position — a strategy to make the company look good, as CEO Owen Jenkins (Ben Batt, Scott & Bailey) and his brother, CEO Gareth Jenkins (Kieran Bew, Warrior), are planning to take the company public and float their stock on the stock exchange.
It’s an eventful first day for Maya, triggered by a different kind of discovery within the company — one that introduces her to Tess (Callie Cooke, The Stranger), a troubled young employee who’s been working there for more than a decade. During their meeting, Tess reveals that her Fly friend and colleague, Amy, died ten years, so Maya gets why she would be upset; it’s the anniversary. But there is more to this than grief.
Maya quickly begins to learn that the workplace culture at Fly Dynamic, supposedly full of shiny, happy people, is, in fact, toxic. And as she delves into certain things that had happened at the company over the years, things start to unravel and secrets begin to be exposed. Meanwhile, Maya has her own personal problems to deal with, as does Sam.
The question they both want answered, though, is what happened that led to Amy’s death ten years ago? And how might it be connected to the suspicious death that just happened?
Costars in the drama include Dario Coates (Endeavour), Dominic Vulliamy (Mount Pleasant), Alison Steadman (Gavin & Stacey), Zoë Tapper (Liar), Katherine Pearce (Vera), Megan Parkinson (Ackley Bridge), Tanya Vital (Emmerdale Farm), and Rory Keenan (Striking Out).
Rules of the Game is currently available for streaming in the US exclusively on Hulu.
(Viewers in the UK can stream the miniseries on BBC iPlayer.)
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