Masterpiece

Popular mystery series Grantchester returns to Masterpiece, kicking off its highly anticipated third season with the series' first Christmas special.

Join us for weekly recaps and chat about the latest story developments afterward! 

Grantchester, the period drama about crime solving Anglican priest Sidney Chambers and his partner Inspector Geordie Keating returns this weekend with Christmas in June.

Poldark Season 3 arrives on BBC One in only a few days. Unfortunately for us in the US, it won't air on PBS until October.

What do in the meantime? We've got some suggestions. Here are five programs you might want to check out while we wait. 

Masterpiece presents a portrait of Mary Ann Cotton, the first female serial killer in the industrial era, in drama Dark Angel. A story of the a woman who killed her victims using pots of tea laced with arsenic, the two hour production explores what might make a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown tip into madness.

This Sunday, PBS will air the BBC's production of Dark Angel, which focuses on the life of Mary Ann Cotton, one of the 19th century's most prolific serial killers, and one that you've mostly likely never heard of.

What drives a killer to take the lives of those around them? This is a question that has an entire subgenre of entertainment devoted to it, from true crime novels, to Lifetime movies, to tevision specials on the Discovery Channel to podcasts like Serial. But most of these focus on male killers -- your John Wayne Gacys, your Ted Bundys, your Jack the Rippers. But this weekend, Masterpiece presents a dramatic miniseries that focuses on one of the lesser known serial killers of the 1800s, Mary Anne Cotton, whose death count may in fact be higher than any of those mentioned above. 

King Charles III has all the hallmarks of a Shakespearean history play, one that tells that sad truth that "Monarchs should be seen and not heard." But what does it say about the United Kingdom that it insists on telling the tale of the end of our second Elizabethan age era with the trappings usually reserved for a first Elizabethan aged production?

King Charles III airs this weekend on Masterpiece, a Shakepearan style historical drama about history that hasn't actually happened yet. We reflect on the end of the second Elizabethan Age and the anxiety about it that has brought about such a drama before its time. 

Wolf Hall reaches its inevitable conclusion, as Anne Boleyn fails to save herself, while Thomas Cromwell watches her fate, knowing one day it will most likely be his own.

In our penultimate episode of Wolf Hall, Cromwell changes the course of history twice, once when his desire to see Jane Seymour has unexpected consequences, and once when Henry VIII dies.

This week's episode of Wolf Hall takes the plot of the famous A Man For All Seasons and turns it sideways.

Meanwhile, Anne may have nutured her way to be queen, but nature is refusing to cooperate.