'The Gold' Will Shine on PBS for October 2025
The last ten years in the television industry have been a virtual tsunami of new shows. Between Hulu and Amazon's early attempts to compete with Netflix, and Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Bros. launching their own services, the sudden demand for more original series surged as networks discovered the need to fill the seemingly endless content gap. In 2002, there were ~180 scripted series, which increased to ~280 by 2012. In comparison, 2022 saw 600 scripted shows debut between January and December, a jump that was not only remarkable but also unsustainable. The sheer deluge of titles meant many shows never even got noticed, let alone watched, especially on less popular services like Paramount+, where shows like The Gold and Sexy Beast arrived with little marketing and even less notice.
Unlike Sexy Beast, which was a straight-up misfire based on a twenty-year-old film that most Americans no longer remember (if they ever heard of it at all), The Gold was a series that, on paper, had all the makings of a U.S. hit. Featuring an all-star cast of British actors well-known to Anglophiles and PBS viewers, the series delves into one of the biggest heists ever attempted in the 20th century — the Brink's-Mat robbery, in which £26 million in gold bars and diamonds was stolen by a group of petty career criminals.
Having caught the car, none of them knew what to do with it, and had to hand their ill-gotten gains over to trained goldsmiths and upper-class lawyers who could launder it via Swiss banks, who, naturally, made sure none of them ever saw a dime. The police never did either — none of the gold was ever recovered.
