'Our House' is a Very-Very-Very Fine House, But a Not-So-Good Series

Based on the 2018 Sunday Times bestseller novel of the same name by Louise Candlish, Our House was adapted by Simon Ashdown (Eastenders) and directed by Sheree Folkson (Bridgerton) for Red Planet Pictures/ITV back in 2022. The four-episode show originally debuted on PBS Passport for members in May 2023, and now has come to broadcast, airing on local PBS stations on Thursdays in August. In the U.K. it tapped into deep-seated feelings of uncertainty and loss. A house is more than just a building, but a foundation stone of your family, community, and well-being.

This can’t be right. How would you feel if you came home and you found everything gone, strangers moved into your house, your husband missing, everything you’ve worked your whole life for ...

Fi Lawson (Tuppence Middleton, Downton Abbey) returns home after a weekend away and finds strangers moving into her house. In addition, her husband Bram (Martin Compston, Line Of Duty) and her two young sons Leo (Tommy Finnegan) and Harry (Casper Knopf) are missing and inaccessible. A call to the school principal reveals that they’re out with their father, who is not answering his phone, an annoying little blip of extraneous plot that goes away. Only one other person’s name is on the deeds to the house, and that’s Bram, so it’s a great big fat hint that he was somehow behind this, if Fi is being truthful. (That this is an immediate question quietly proves how much the series is priming viewers for the unreliable narrator trope from the jump.)