By Now that we've come down off the collective adrenal rush of its finale, there's a massive Bodyguard-shaped hole in the TV drama schedule now that Jed Mercurio's twist-stuffed drama has ended, and it needs filling.
There are now roughly 10.4 million people - Bodyguard scored the highest viewing figures for a BBC drama series in a decade - staring listlessly at their living room walls and laptops, willing an explosion or a clearly Amber Rudd-inspired Tory Home Secretary to appear. It's over though, friends. Let it go.
Fortunately, there are plenty of crime dramas around to scratch whatever itch Bodyguard did for you, whether you're after more high-level governmental conspiracy, terror plots, deranged villains or just straight-up murder.
Happy Valley
Crime dramas set in the north tend to be a bit miserable - Dalziel and Pascoe, Wire in the Blood, Prey - but Happy Valley's cast of lost souls out-glooms the lot of them. Sarah Lancashire is embattled police sergeant Caroline Cawood, who's trying to sort out a kidnapping case in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. Unfortunately, her sister is a recovering heroin addict, and Cawood's still trying to process her teenage daughter's suicide, as well as realising that a convicted rapist (played by Edward Norton) who attacked her daughter is back in town. Following Cawood as she tries to find him as well as the kidnapped child - and, later, proving she's not a serial killer - isn't exactly a barrel of laughs, but it's totally gripping.
Luther
Idris Elba is DCI John Luther, a near-genius investigator with a really, really nice jacket whose intense, cerebral investigation style puts him somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Columbo. The massive dollop of brooding charisma Elba gives it means it's got a lot more heft than most police procedurals, as does the way his intellectual admiration for the psychopaths he investigates - especially Ruth Wilson's astrophysicist-prodigy-slash-parent-killer Alice Morgan - often gives way to actual friendship.
Line Of Duty
Jed Mercurio, the head honcho on Bodyguard, made his name as the go-to guy for powerhouse crime drama on Line of Duty. However, Bodyguard looks like a kind of Sunday night Mission: Impossible next to the more Le Carré-influenced Line of Duty, with its subtly drawn characters and carefully woven storylines. It follows the detectives of anti-corruption unit AC-12 as they investigate their fellow officers, with each series following a separate investigation. It sounds simple enough, but the amount of twists and handbrake-turn reveals it packs in while still swerving obvious or cheap resolutions is head-spinning.
Broadchurch
The last British drama to have a Bodyguard-style grip over Twitter focused on David Tennant and Olivia Colman's investigation into how an 11-year-old ended up splattered all over the bottom of a cliff in sleepy Dorset. Everyone's a suspect, from the mild-mannered reverend to the chummy local plumber. You're probably better off swerving the second series, which covers the alleged killer's trial and takes its sweet old time doing it, but the first is a masterclass in patiently built paranoia, narrative curveballs and creeping dread. There's also a subplot involving Will Mellor from Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps as a deeply unhelpful medium too, which doesn't happen anywhere near often enough in crime dramas.
Life On Mars
The exception which proves the it's-crim-up-north rule true, this time-travelling caper paired Manchester detective Sam Tyler (John Simm) - apparently hit by a car so hard that he flew back in time from 2006 to 1973 - with unreconstructed drinker, homophobe, misogynist and fist-slinging city sheriff Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister). It's really funny, but it isn't all a total lark: heading back to early-70s Britain meant it could tackle racism, sexism, football hooliganism, terrorism and corruption, even if it was only ever about three minutes away from dropping a Roxy Music banger on the soundtrack. Part-procedural, part-period drama, part-high concept psychological thriller, all genius.
River
In this underrated one-season wonder, melancholy maverick Stellan Skarsgard mopes around London trying to solve some murders while being pursued by his personal demons. So far, so Scandi-noir. However, Skarsgard's DI John River is very literally pursued by his demons: he sees hallucinations of murder victims and hears them talking to him, so much of the action happens inside his head. It's a crime drama which isn't just about crime; it's about why murder happens, grief and loss, and there's a rare sense of humanity to it.
A Very British Scandal
The second coming of Hugh Grant hit its peak with the true story of Liberal Party MP Jeremy Thorpe (Grant) and his battle to make sure his secret affair with passionate, naive, unstable stable boy Norman Scott (Ben Whishaw) in the early 1960s remained a secret affair. As Thorpe climbs the party ranks the threat of Scott revealing their past together grows more and more dangerous, especially in a Britain where homosexuality had only recently been decriminalised. There follows conspiracy, possibly the most ludicrous and incompetent assassination attempt ever mounted and an unflinching look at the hypocrisies of the political classes and the aristocracy which manages to balance personal tragedy with total farce.
