One of two niche streaming services* dedicated to serving UK content to global audiences, BritBox is the best place to look for all your favorite British TV available at any time. In honor of the streamer’s commitment to British mysteries and detective dramas, Paste is presenting you, our readers, with this updated BritBox guide. Anglophiles, read on!
Comprising everything from the U.K.’s biggest contemporary hits to the most beloved classics from BBC and ITV eras past—plus Inside No. 9, which manages to be both—the BritBox catalog is sure to have something to fit whatever mood you might be in. Got a hankering to watch a Timelord travel through space and time? BritBox is the exclusive home of the first 26 series of classic Doctor Who. Curious to see how the British medical drama differs from Grey’s Anatomy? Holby City Hospital is ready for you to burst through its ward doors. Itching to dive into the classic misadventures of your friendly neighborhood vicar? Well, has BritBox got a truly—and I mean truly—incredible number of clergy-adjacent options for you to choose from, including Father Brown and Sister Boniface Mysteries, the former’s irreverent nunnish spin-off.
Of course, BritBox has more to offer than clergy-cloaked capers! Our new top 10 recommended titles (plus bonus lightning round featuring the best of the service’s curated “channels”) can be found below.
But first, a quick primer:
What Makes It Unique: All-but-live streaming of daily BBC/ITV programming like Good Morning Britain, Coronation Street and Emmerdale, as well as topical weekly programming like Brexitcast, Gardener’s World and Mock the Week; the entirety of Classic Doctor Who and Midsomer Murders; exclusive access to other popular BBC/ITV programming, both new (Vera, Death in Paradise, RHS Chelsea Flower Show) and from the vaults (the Up series, Mr. Bean, The Sweeney)
What You’ll Find on This List: For the most part, BritBox divides its extensive catalog into categories defined either by recency—Now, Classics, Last Chance—or by genre—Drama, Mystery, British Home & Garden.
* Profiled in a separate column, Acorn TV aims to scratch the same anglophilic itch that BritBox does. But while the two services cater to similar audiences, the experiences (and catalogs) they provide are different enough that it isn’t really a question of which one is best. They are, like Hulu and Netflix, just… different. With its investment in not just original but also international content, Acorn TV is more reminiscent of Netflix. Meanwhile, with its network television roots and the fact that it posts new episodes of soaps, panel shows, and morning news programs within 24 hours of them airing in the U.K., BritBox much more closely resembles Hulu. Acorn TV gives its subscribers an eclectically global experience while BritBox has the edge in the “this is what to watch when you want to feel like you’re in Britain” department.
That out of the way, let’s get to the streaming goods:
The Cleaner
Starring: Greg Davies and Zita Sattar, with guest spots from Helena Bonham Carter, David Mitchell, Asim Chaudhry, Roisin Conaty and more
Seasons available: 2
We may love Greg Davies most around these parts for his iron rule as the Taskmaster on, well, Taskmaster, but a couple years ago he pulled on his bright white noddy suit and stepped into the role of small town crime scene cleaner for, funnily enough, The Cleaner. In a premise pretty much tailor-made for pandemic-era production, The Cleaner opens each episode with Paul “Wicky” Wickstead rolling up to a crime scene after the police have left, lorry full of cleaning supplies at hand, only to be confounded in one way or another by someone else on the premises. In some cases, it’s the murderer. In others, it’s a neighbor. Sometimes it’s unclear, which lets Davies take the episode to unexpected places.
In the second season, new to the streamer this summer, Wicky takes on his most challenging scene yet: love. Or at least, the potential for it, as the bloody remnants of romance carpeting many of the crime scenes he’s assigned to find the glimmers of a reflection in the possibly romantic threads cropping up in his personal life. The thrust of the series is still finding comedy in incidental interactions, and it’s still focused on giving Davies a chance to chop it up with a rotating slate of funny guest stars like Asim Chaudhry and Roisin Conaty, but in giving its audience more insight into Wicky as a person, The Cleaner makes a solid case that anyone can grow, even in middle age.
Sherwood
Starring: David Morrissey, Robert Glenister, Lesley Manville, Lorraine Ashbourne, Claire Rushbrook, Adam Hugill, Adeel Akhtar, Clare Holman, Terence Maynard, Nadine Marshall
Seasons available: 1 (limited series)
Given the galvanizing upswing of unionization we have been in the middle of here in the States these past few years, the moment could hardly be better for a show like Sherwood, a limited series crime thriller which takes its narrative inspiration from two different historical events from the Nottinghamshire mining region. First, a pair of astonishing murders that took place in Nottinghamshire in 2004 (and which eventually led to the largest manhunt in UK history), and second, the violent clashes sparked by the miners’ strike in the mid-1980s, which set the miners on strike against both the local miners that crossed the picket line (scabs), and the brutish Met officers imported from London on Margaret Thatcher’s orders to put the strike down. How the reverberations of that (fictionalized) 1984 strike inform not just the crossbow mayhem of the current day, but all the ways in which the community relates to one another (or, as often, doesn’t) is the main question Sherwood sets out to answer, so no spoilers here. But if the power of collective action and the complexity inherent to building community is as interesting to you as serial crossbow murder, Sherwood is a show for you.
Gardeners’ World & The RHS Chelsea Flower Show
Hosted by: Monty Don
Seasons available: 4 (2023, and the 2022, 2023, and 2024 Winter Specials)
One of the features that makes BritBox stand out in the niche streamer space is its next-day streaming of quintessential British mainstays. On the daily front, this means stateside viewers can keep up with Good Morning Britain (news), EastEnders (soap), Emmerdale (soap), and Doctors (medical soap). On the weekly front, this feature nets us everything from topical panel shows like Mock the Week to more straightforward punditry like Question Time to (most delightfully) seasonable home and gardening programming like Springwatch, Escape to the Country, and Gardeners’ World.
This last one has been running since 1968 and has been gently hosted by master gardener Monty Don (and his dogs) more or less constantly since 2003. Gardner’s World runs every Friday through the growing season and features a comforting combination of real-time planting projects Don has taken on in his gigantic home garden, visits by co-hosts to interesting gardens around the UK, and real-time growing tips Don calls “Jobs to do this weekend” that close out each episode. Since the start of the pandemic, they’ve added in home videos of gardens from viewers not just around the UK, but around the world, a feature which thus far has never failed to make this critic (and newbie home gardener) tear up.
And that isn’t all: BritBox has given true British garden culture lovers even more reasons to subscribe by running the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, a multi-episode garden show extravaganza that features many of the same faces and segments as Gardener’s World, just at a grander scale. Like, working kitchen-show garden, and mountainous gorilla habitat, and Mary Berry as guest host grand scale! A genuine streaming delight.
The Tower
Starring: Gemma Whelan, Tahirah Sharif, Jimmy Akingbola, Emmett J Scanlan, Michael Karim
Seasons available: 2 (and officially renewed for a third)
In many ways, The Tower is a classic of the gritty UK detective drama genre. Adapted by screenwriter and executive producer Patrick Harbinson from Kate London’s Collins and Griffiths novels, the ITV Original is a tense, terse examination of the best (and the worst) the London Met has to offer. On the one hand, you’ve got multiple generations of diverse officers, working at every level of the force, in every department, all with a grumbling but mostly committed eye towards incorporating an evolved, contemporary understanding of how things like race and class and gender and immigration status can complicate not just a community’s internal dynamics, but also those between that community and the cops assigned to police it. On the other hand, you’ve got intractable corruption. That classic mix!
What makes The Tower stand out is the two women it sets up as its leads, DS Sarah Collins (Gemma Whelan), a beleaguered and socially isolated internal affairs officer charged in the first season with investigating the on-duty death of a beat officer with a pretty rough (read: racist, sexist, bullying) reputation, and PC Lizzie Adama (Tahirah Sharif), that cop’s rookie partner, who went suspiciously AWOL after watching him and teen Libyan refugee (Lola Elsokari) fall off the roof of the tower block where the girl’s family lived. As women in an overwhelmingly male professional space, the two characters face many of the same obstacles—parallels that are only strengthened when taking into consideration Collins’ sexuality and Adama’s race, both details which serve to further marginalize them in the eyes of their mostly white, mostly straight, mostly male colleagues.
But rather than being set up as sympathetic co-conspirators in making the Met better, Collins and Adama are immediately and almost intractably positioned as magnetically opposing poles: Collins, the veteran, has zero patience for a rookie who seems constitutionally incapable of following the rules that are meant to keep her and the rest of the community safe, while Adama, the headstrong rookie, has zero patience for being told there’s only one appropriate way to do things. Neither is “right,” in both the first season and the second, but nor is either woman entirely wrong. It’s a compelling set-up, and with fewer than a handful of episodes in each season, it’s an easy enough watch for a long weekend.
