Gillian Anderson leads broadchurch rival The Fall, a British-Irish psychological crime drama that landed 96% and 94% Rotten Tomatoes scores in its first two seasons. For viewers deciding whether to start a 2013 series that now spans three seasons, those early numbers make the opening stretch the clear selling point.
Anderson and Dornan Lead
Anderson and Jamie Dornan starred in the lead roles when Allan Cubitt wrote and created the series for television. Set in Northern Ireland and filmed there, the show also featured John Lynch, Stuart Graham, Niamh McGrady, Archie Panjabi, Bronagh Waugh, Sarah Beattie, and Laura Donnelly, giving it a cast with enough range to carry a slow-burn investigation rather than a one-note procedural.
One IMDb review called The Fall “undoubtedly one of the best crime series that have ever been made.” That judgment sits alongside the Broadchurch comparison and tells the same story from a different angle: this is not a show being sold on nostalgia, but one still being measured against the genre’s better-known benchmarks.
96%, 94%, 65%
The first season’s 96% Rotten Tomatoes rating and the second season’s 94% put the opening chapters in elite company, while the third season fell to 65%. The spread is unusual enough to matter for anyone starting the series now, because it points viewers toward a show whose reputation rests most heavily on what came first.
The average Rotten Tomatoes score across all three seasons is 85%, which keeps the series comfortably above the level of an ordinary long-running crime drama. But the gap between the first two seasons and the third is the friction point: the early run is where the strongest critical case was built, and that is where new viewers are most likely to get the payoff that drove the comparison with Broadchurch and Prime Suspect.
Three Seasons on Streamers
The Fall is available on Netflix and iPlayer in three seasons, giving new viewers a direct path to test the ratings for themselves. For a series that premiered in 2013, the practical takeaway is simple: if you are choosing where to begin, the first two seasons are the safest bet, and the numbers say the third is a softer landing.
