BritBox Scoops Up Welsh Comedy Crime Series 'Death Valley'
With the financial backing of the BBC and Robert Schildhouse as its new CEO, BritBox has a new lease on life for 2025. The U.K.-centric streamer, initially a joint project between the BBC and ITV to prevent international piracy of iPlayer and ITV's streaming service, was bought out by the BBC in early 2024. Since then, it has been slowly ramping up its offerings, and 2025 promises to be a banner year with so many new titles that it seems almost incorrect to refer to it as a niche service. The streaming service has also started deliberately choosing series tailored directly to American tastes, like Death Valley, which may remind readers of a certain Hulu comic mystery series hit with Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez.
As with most of the shows aimed at Anglophiles, Death Valley is, first and foremost, a cozy crime series starring a well-known aging British actor, in this case, Timothy Spall, who rose to international fame starring in multiple Mike Leigh films and most recently starred in The Sixth Commandment. Spall will star in the series as the "amateur" half of the cozy crime-detecting duo, now technically a pensioner; his character, John Chapel, is a world-renowned actor and "national treasure" after starring for years as the lead in the cozy crime series Caesar, which was a hit on both sides of the pond.
Naturally, playing a detective on TV makes Chapel a natural at solving crimes in his Welsh community because he's learned so much from police procedurals. Pity his partner-in-crime-solving, DS Janie Mallowan, played by Gwyneth Keyworth (Doctor Thorne).
