Danny Brocklehurst's ITV adultery drama Adultery arrives on television tonight with Romola Garai and Dominic Cooper at its centre. It runs for six episodes, and the opening is deliberately restrained before the series moves into the more explicit fallout of Beth and Tom's affair.
Beth and Tom in Adultery
Romola Garai plays Beth, a bored, put-upon personal trainer who repeats the motto, "Attraction plus obstacle equals excitement." Dominic Cooper plays Tom, a doctor who is already married and is also the father of Beth's son's new girlfriend. That set-up gives the series a neat transactional logic: the attraction is immediate, the obstacle is built into the family structure.
Beth is married to a useless husband and is the mother of an ungrateful son. Before the series begins, her best mate unexpectedly dies, which leaves the character primed for bad decisions rather than self-improvement. The result is a drama that uses the affair format less as a moral lecture than as a pressure test for desire, routine and guilt.
Danny Brocklehurst's six episodes
Danny Brocklehurst created and wrote the series, and that matters because the structure is doing heavy lifting here. Six episodes is enough room for a quick spark, a reckoning and the fallout that follows, without dragging the premise into soap territory. The opener stays pretty PG, but the show promises trysts in cars, toilets and a city farm, so the escalation is built into the run rather than dumped into one scene.
The series is also being described as moreish, which fits the shape of the pitch better than any grand claim about reinvention. The appeal is straightforward: viewers get a compact affair drama with two recognisable leads, a closed circle of relationships and enough friction to keep each episode moving toward the next bad choice.
Tonight's TV lineup
Adultery being singled out for tonight's TV lineup makes it an easy pick for anyone wanting adult relationship drama rather than a broad crowd-pleaser. The hook is not novelty for its own sake; it is the combination of a familiar cheating setup with a clean six-episode run and a lead pair whose characters are both married, making every step forward costlier than the last.
For viewers, that means the question is not whether Beth and Tom will cross the line, but how much damage the series can squeeze out of that line once it is crossed. On that evidence, Adultery looks built to reward anyone willing to start tonight and stick with all six episodes.
