The BBC Makes Reservations for Gaelic Drama 'The Island' ('An t-Eilean')

When BBC Alba, the Gaelic-language offshoot of BBC Scotland, announced the commissioning of The Island (An t-Eilean) in March 2024, it boasted that the series would be the biggest and most high-profile Gaelic drama in the network's (and the country's) history. In the area's finest tradition, the series is a Scottish Noir crime thriller, though this is no ordinary Annika-style crime of the week show. A per-episode budget of £ 1 million may not sound that outlandish (especially compared to The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, whose first 16 episodes cost north of $ 1 billion), but for a crime thriller, and one that's not in English to boot, that's big money.

The resulting series must be worth the expenditure, as BBC One announced in early January 2025 that it was also signing on to air it. Describing it as "a twisting story of lies, loss and long-buried secrets set against the elemental backdrop of the Western Isles of Scotland," the series sounds like it could be picked up by PBS Masterpiece, except for the minor language barrier issue. (Hey, Walter Presents is right there, my friends.)

This will be the biggest show in one of the U.K.'s "endangered" Indigenous languages, but that's part of the point. Anglophiles who love Wales and all things Welsh (or at least watch Welcome to Wrexham) may have heard about the Cymraeg 2050 initiative to gain one million Welsh speakers 400 years after the language was banned. A significant part of the country's success in bringing it back has been producing TV shows in Welsh (or in both Welsh and English) so that the next generation will grow up with it as an essential part of the culture.