Masterpiece, Guilt

Sundays, Sept. 5 & 12, at 9 PM

Repeats Mondays, Sept. 6 & 13, at 2 AM

Also airs on Fusion on Sundays, Sept 12 & 19, at noon

“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” goes the old saying. But that didn’t stop brothers Max and Jake from hiding their guilt after running into an elderly pedestrian during an inebriated drive home from a wedding. Mark Bonnar (Unforgotten) and Jamie Sives (To the Ends of the Earth) star as Max and Jake in a darkly absorbing tale of rascality and deceit, on Guilt, airing in four parts with back-to-back episodes on MASTERPIECE.

Guilt costars Ruth Bradley (Pursuit) as Angie, the niece and closest  relative of the hit-and-run victim, named Walter. Arriving in Edinburgh from her home in Chicago, Angie meets Max and Jake at Walter’s wake, where they have come to retrieve incriminating evidence. Angie and Jake hit it off, which complicates Max’s plan to escape justice.

Also appearing are Emun Elliott (The Paradise) as Kenny, Max’s alcoholic private detective; Sian Brooke (Sherlock) as Claire, Max’s suspicious wife; Moyo Akandé (The Hurricane Heist) as Claire’s more-than-gym buddy, Tina; Ellie Haddington (Foyle’s War) as Walter’s pathologically vigilant neighbor, Sheila; and Bill Paterson (Wives and Daughters) as Roy, a sinister mob boss in Edinburgh.

Hit-and-run perpetrators usually leave the body at the scene, but Max and Jake carry Walter’s corpse to his house nearby and set him up in an easy chair. There, they find a letter revealing that Walter had terminal cancer. “He was dying slowly. We just made it quick,” says Max with relief. “He’d probably thank us.”