BBC thriller / drama starring Andrew Scott (Sherlock), Martin Clunes, Julia McKenzie (Miss Marple) and Kelly Adams (Hustle).

Coming home to small town Renton after receiving some shocking news about his family is harder than 30 year old Mark could ever have imagined. He always had a strained relationship with his parents, his grandmother Betty is now living in his childhood bedroom and he barely knows his teenage sister Jodie. He finds things even more difficult when he meets his first love Alice, who is now married with a child.

But as Mark struggles to come to terms with a new life, he finds that the ties between enigmatic Inspector Franks from the local police and his family are stronger than they first appear – and that Renton is a town full of secrets where everyone knows something you don't.

The Town Review

"ITV1’s new three-part drama The Town stars Andrew “Moriarty” Scott, which is all that needs to be said. Scott – part-panther, part-puppy, and last seen prowling around in Sherlock – is an actor of such power and unpredictability that his TV appearances should be preceded by one of those triangular signs warning of a hazard ahead. Here, in award-winning playwright Mike Bartlett’s first TV script – a thrillingly sinister take on suburbia – Scott played Mark Nicholas, who returned home to the fictional town of Renton following the joint suicide of his parents. His arrival coincided with his mother’s corpse being dropped on the drive by a nervous undertaker; wrapped in a body bag, her lips the colour of an airmail envelope, she looked just like Laura Palmer when her body was found wrapped in plastic at the start of David Lynch’s Nineties drama Twin Peaks. “Welcome home, love,” said Mark’s Gran, played by Miss Marple (Julia McKenzie).

But Renton is spookier than Twin Peaks, although filled with as many secrets. “Often those closest to us hide their problems,” explained the mysterious Inspector Franks (Douglas Hodge) when Mark suggested that his parents might have been murdered. “Your grandad slept with prostitutes,” Gran then revealed, and poor Mark looked as tense as a ticking bomb. In a wonderful moment, Jeff-from-school, dropping round to see if Mark wanted to “get p----d” to take his “mind off it”, noted that his house had a new front door. Bartlett’s dialogue is as close to natural as you get when the world has spun off its axis: Jeff told Mark that he hated London because of the escalators and asked if he knew anyone famous down there, like Dermot O’Leary.

Sudden death made everyday life seem like a hall of fairground mirrors. Down the local it was karaoke night, and while the undertaker was belting out Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, Lucy (Kelly Adams), wearing a skirt the size of a belt, hit on Mark because he was neither “40 nor 12” and didn’t smell. The evening ended with Mark throwing up outside his ex-girlfriend’s house, Lucy snogging Carly (Aisling Bea), her (yes, female) assistant at the flower shop, and Jodie (Avigail Tlalim) – Mark’s 15-year-old sister (Avigail Thalim) – jumping into an infinity pool with a posh boy called Harry (Toby Regbo).
The atmosphere of menace and melancholy never dissipated, and Bartlett was brilliant at showing how shock reveals the weirdness of normality. The day after the karaoke, when Mark tried to get a two-for-one deal on the coffins, the undertaker (who had been in the pub the night before) patiently explained that “it’s financially difficult for everyone at the moment”. The Town might be as tense as a thriller but it is actually, we were reminded, also a state-of-the-nation drama. Which is probably why it was like watching reality TV, as imagined by David Lynch." The Telegraph, UK