'Code of Silence' Hits the Ground Running in the Double Episode Premiere

BritBox’s latest crime thriller, Code of Silence, has hit the ground running with an adrenaline-filled two-episode premiere. The series stars Rose Ayling-Ellis as Alison, a young Deaf woman with a talent for lipreading and a thirst for adventure beyond her mundane life. Alison’s life takes a dramatic turn when she is hired by detectives to read lips to spy on criminals in a dangerous case. 

The series was written and created by Catherine Moulton, whose previous writing credits include the 2023 series Hijack and the recently released The Stolen Girl. Moulton wrote to Alison, drawing on her own experience of being hard of hearing and using lip reading to communicate. The role of Alison is a perfect fit for Ayling-Ellis as a rising star and prominent Deaf actor and advocate for Deaf culture and British Sign Language.

In this series, the mystery is secondary (even tertiary) to Alison’s character development and her personal life. She becomes deeply entrenched in the world of the criminals she investigates, which ultimately reveals more about her desires, insecurities, and past than it does about the crime itself. With richly drawn characters, complex relationships, and a faithful representation of the deaf experience, Code of Silence is so much more than just a thriller.

The show’s masterful sound design is evident from the first moments of its cold open, which features Alison turning off her hearing aids in the back of a police car while sirens and shouts surround her. This is just a taste of what’s to come, because after the opening credits, we land in some unknown amount of time in the past, where Alison is working in the cafeteria of a police department.

While working, Alison is approached by detectives from her building who have heard about her lip-reading skills. She meets Detective Ashleigh Francis (Charlotte Ritchie) and Detective James Marsh (Andrew Buchan), who are trailing a gang of jewel thieves. All of their regular lipreaders (because yes, that’s a real job) are busy, but they need someone to decipher the jewel thieves’ conversations caught on video. The detectives seem nervous about talking with her, both because of the sensitive nature of the case and because they are unsure how to communicate with a Deaf person. Alison forges ahead and accepts the lip-reading gig, promising to keep the details of the case confidential.

Over the ensuing days, Alison tries her hand at lipreading from security cameras and other footage, and it turns out her skills are essential to the case. She discovers that a new member of the gang, a young man named Liam Barlow (Kieron Moore), has been brought on as a hacker. The detectives tell her not to look up the details of the case, but as soon as she leaves the police station, she hits Google, holding back a smile. As it turns out, Alison is a closeted adrenaline junkie, willing to go far beyond the call of duty for a civilian lipreader.

Amid the excitement of her lipreading job, her home life is faltering, as she and her mom Julie (Fifi Garfield) find out they are going to be evicted from their council apartment to make way for luxury apartments. Alison’s ex-boyfriend Eithan (Rolf Choutan) works for the council, and her mom implores her to ask him for help. Julie and Eithan are both Deaf, providing insight into how she communicates and relaxes when not under pressure to prove herself to hearing people.

After Alison goes with Detective Francis to stake out a meeting of the gang in person, she feels emboldened to go a step further. Without telling the detectives, Alison goes to the Canterbury Tap, a bar where one of the gang members works and the others are known to congregate. There, she discovers that the heist plan is likely bigger and more high-tech than the detectives initially suspected. When she brings this information to the detectives, they tell her, “Just stick to lipreading, leave the detection to us.”

To make matters worse, Alison is fired from her job at the cafeteria. She confides to her mom that she feels they were looking for an excuse to fire her because she is Deaf. Alison says, “I don’t want to be hearing, I just want them to be a bit deaf. I’m really fed up with trying to prove myself.”

Thanks to her off-the-record snooping, she knows that the Canterbury Tap is hiring, and she gets herself a job there as a bartender. The young hacker from the gang, Liam, orders a drink from her, and they flirt through a conversation that is carefully calculated on Alison’s end. She tries to follow him home from the bar to snoop some more, but in her haste, she bikes in front of his car, and he hits her. She insists she’s fine, but ever the gentleman, he insists on driving him to the hospital, where they wait in the emergency room together.

The next day, Alison watches from the detectives’ monitors as Liam tells the gang that he missed a meeting with them because he was helping a girl whom he had hit with his car. Alison reads his lips, but declines to share this key detail with the detectives. 

As the second episode kicks off, Liam returns to the bar, this time to ask Alison out. She hedges but says yes. Finally exercising some good judgment, Alison admits to Ashleigh that she has been working at the bar, and after some questioning from James, she acknowledged that she was at the hospital with Liam. Ashleigh and James are understandably furious, but they need her skills, so they let her off with a warning.

Liam asks Alison to accompany him on a night out in London, which she knows from the surveillance footage is a cover for a covert meeting about the jewel heist. Of course, Liam doesn’t know that she knows this. At the bar, she watches Liam talk to a man about the heist, but Liam’s business doesn’t stop them from having a good time. They dance and exchange banter, and Alison opens up to Liam about the fact that her father left her and her mom when she was young. Liam feels Alison is asking him too many probing questions and is getting a little suspicious. Still, he asks to see her again when the night is over. She declines, telling him it’s complicated. Complicated is an understatement!

The next day, Alison meets up with Ashleigh to give her the intel she gathered on the night out. The detectives agree to take her on as a civilian informant but warn her not to put herself in danger.

When Alison returns to the Canterbury Tap for her shift, she spies on Braden (Joe Abloom), the bar’s owner and a member of the heist gang. She watches on the bar’s security camera as Braden and Liam discuss their plans. As she’s about to text Ashleigh what she’s seen, Braden sneaks up behind her and demands to see her phone. Braden and Liam get aggressive with her, a far cry from the sweet persona Liam had kept up on their night out. Alison can delete her text conversation with Ashleigh before they can see her phone, but for the first time in her involvement with the case, she’s thoroughly rattled.

The first two episodes of Code of Silence are streaming now on BritBox, with the remaining episodes of the series dropping on Thursdays through the end of August 2025.