'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. 

However, to have a hit, one must market a show, and too many of the streaming services that launched in the late 2010s walked in with an assumption that if they built it, people would simply watch. That's just not how the world works, and The Gold flopped so hard that by the time Sexy Beast debuted, Paramount+ had already canned their entire international slate, including walking away from The Gold Season 2. In their place, PBS has picked up the series (both seasons) and will premiere the first in October 2025 on linear and PBS Passport.

Will audiences watch this time? It's unclear. On the one hand, The Gold was a show that screamed that it belonged on PBS from the get-go: The cast, the series creator, and the production team were all people PBS regularly works with, and the 1980s period piece nature felt designed to appeal directly to fans of the original Morse and the old Prime Suspect. That's not even considering that the PBS audience was built for a show like this, while the Yellowstone/Star Trek watching crowd on Paramount+ was not. However, the show has already premiered in the U.S. and was available to stream on Paramount+ until recently. It remains to be seen if this "new to you" series will be new enough for viewers to drive ratings. 

As usual, the Masterpiece-supplied synopsis doesn't tell audiences much:

The Gold, inspired by the true story of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery — one of the largest in British history — is coming to Masterpiece on PBS. Welcome to the 1980s, awash with cheap money and loosened morals, and witness the extraordinary and epic story.

Here's the (far superior) synopsis from the BBC when the series first aired in 2023:

They were looking for £1 million. They found £26 million. Inspired by the biggest gold heist in Britain's history, The Gold tells the story of the 1983 Brink’s Mat robbery that kicked off decades of investigation, corruption, arrests, and murder as the police tried to identify the criminals and recover the gold.

The cast of The Gold is a who's who of PBS favorites, with Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey) starring as real-life investigator DCI Brian Boyce, alongside Emun Elliott (Guilt) and Charlotte Spencer (Sanditon) as members of London's "Flying Squadron" that initially handled the burglary, the real life DC Tony Brightwell and composite fictionalized character DS Nicki Jennings, plus and Peter Davison (Doctor Who) as Scotland Yard head Gordon Stewart. 

The series also features Dominic Cooper (That Dirty Black Bag), Jack Lowden (Slow Horses), Tom Cullen (Becoming Elizabeth), Sean Harris (The Green Knight), Ellora Torchia (Indian Summers), Stefanie Martini (Prime Suspect 1973), Daniel Ings (I Hate Suzie), and Adam Nagaitis (The Responder). 

Season 2, which has not yet premiered on the BBC, will feature Tom Hughes (Victoria), Stephen Campbell Moore (Masters of the Air), Rochelle Neil (Three Little Birds), Joshua McGuire (Blitz), and Joshua Samuels (Saltburn).

Series creator Neil Forsyth (Guilt) wrote all six episodes; directing duties were split between Aneil Karia (Top Boy) and Lawrence Gough (Endeavour). The Gold was commissioned in partnership with the BBC, and Tannadice Pictures produced the series in conjunction with Paramount Television International Studios (Season 1) and All3Media International (Season 2).

The Gold Season 1 will premiere on Sunday, October 5, 2025, at 10 p.m. ET on most local PBS stations, the PBS app, and the PBS Masterpiece Channel. All episodes will arrive as a binge on PBS Passport for members on premiere day.