'The Sixth Commandment': Sarah Phelps and Saul Dibb on Finding the Light In a Dark True Crime Story

American audiences are likely first learning about the tragic deaths of Peter Farquar and Ann Moore-Martin thanks to the BritBox true crime drama The Sixth Commandment. The four-part series dramatizes the crimes of Ben Fields, a charismatic student who drugged, gaslit, and finally murdered Farquar, in Buckinghamshire in 2015. (And attempted to do the same to his neighbor, Ann Moore-Martin almost immediately afterward though her demise was ultimately determined to be of natural causes and not due to the poison he'd given her.)

It’s an awful story of isolation and loneliness, but writer Sarah Phelps (The Pale Horse) and director Saul Dibb (Bullet Boy) manage to tell it in such a way that it never feels exploitative. Instead, the series is warm and compassionate down to the ground, reminding us that this isn’t the story of one monster’s crimes, but a reflection on the lives of his victims—who they were, what they they believed in, how they loved, the lives they each touched, and the memories they left behind.

We had the chance to chat with both Phelps and Dibb about how they approached telling the story of such a recent crime, the thematic and visual throughlines that ground the series, and how they wanted to give Fields' victims back the grace and hope he so brutally stole from them both.