BBC and Showtime Team Up for Thriller Series ‘The Woman In The Wall’

In 2013, the Irish government issued a formal state apology and restitution regarding the secretive institutions surrounding Magdalene Laundries. At the time, it marked the end of a twenty-year scandal sparked by the 1993 discovery of 155 unmarked graves, which led to an investigation into the Roman Catholic institutions that ran these places. Also known as Magdalene asylums, these places, initially founded in 1765 and which lasted until 1996, started as a place that imprisoned "fallen" women (i.e., prostitutes) before morphing into a place to send girls who were "troubled" or pregnant out of wedlock, before eventually becoming entangled in the larger criminal justice system.

Since the scandal broke, it's been the subject of everything from documentaries like Sex in a Cold Climate to the 2002 Peter Mullan film The Magdalene Sisters. Now the BBC and Showtime are collaborating on a new limited series, The Woman In The Wall, a gothic thriller inspired by the story. The story will be fictional, focusing on a woman with extreme PTSD from her teenage years incarcerated in one of Ireland's notorious Magdalene Laundries. The series will also be a murder mystery that begins when a dead body turns up in the woman's house.

The six-part drama will star Ruth Wilson (His Dark Materials), whose biggest hit in the states was for Showtime in The Affair, a series she abruptly left without explanation in 2018. (Wilson later revealed that she resigned in protest of how the series handled filming sex scenes, part of a larger scandal that has engulfed multiple TV projects under the CBS and Paramount banner.) Wilson will be more in control of this series, as she is also executive producing along with series creator Joe Murtagh (Calm With Horses), director Harry Wootliff (True Things), and Endeavour Content-backed Motive Pictures.