Showtime Sets January Premiere Date for Thriller 'The Woman in the Wall'

Showtime has set a January premiere date for The Woman in the Wall, a tense and emotional thriller that aims to explore the legacy of one of Ireland's most shocking and inhumane scandals — the institutions known as the Magdalene Laundries,

The twisty mystery thriller stars Ruth Wilson (His Dark Materials) as Lorna, a woman who wakes one morning to discover a corpse in her house. Horrifyingly, she has no idea who the dead woman is, how the body got into her home, or whether she herself might be responsible for what looks very much like a murder. Lorna has no memory of what occurred the night before, because Lorna has long suffered from extreme bouts of sleepwalking, has done ever since she was a teenager and forced to live at Kilkinure Convent, where her daughter Agnes was cruelly taken away from her.

Lorna was the victim of one of Ireland's many Magdalene Laundries, where "fallen women" of various stripes were often put to work as punishment for having sex outside of marriage. Also known as Magdalene asylums, most women who were sent to these institutions were pregnant with illegitimate children, they were also often home to those who had been accused of adultery, prostitution, same-sex attraction, or other sexual sin. Though they sound --- and were --- barbaric, the last of the Magdalene Laundries imprisoned women all the way up until 1996, when the Gloucester Street Laundry finally closed. It was home to 40 women at the time, most of whom had developmental disabilities.