Starz Acquires Rebecca Hall Drama 'The Listeners'

Starz continues to pile up content that will almost certainly be of peak interest to Anglophiles in 2026. Alongside the final season of Outlander, the second season of Sweetpea, and the newly acquired period drama Amadeus, which aer all set to debut this year, the cable network has just scooped up the five-part series The Listeners.

The stars Rebecca Hall (The Beauty) as English teacher Claire, who begins to hear a low, humming sound that no one else around her can hear. Tormented by the sound that won't cease and that no doctors can seem to find a medical reason for, her life begins to unravel. But when she discovers that one of her students can also hear The Hum, they strike up an unlikely friendship that leads them both into a search for answers.

"What I really enjoyed about the scripts is that it explores a mystery that is located in someone's subjective experience," Hall said in an interview before the series' U.K. broadcast. "To the rest of the world, if there is no way to prove an experience a person is claiming to go through, the conclusion is to brand them as crazy. For Claire, a subjective experience is happening, and she is desperately hunting for answers. This throws up the question of how do you prove something that is subjective or that is felt."

The series aired in the U.K. over a year ago, an unusually long broadcast gap in the streaming era, but, if nothing else, it's a sign that all isn't lost for recent dramas we're still waiting to see cross the pond. (Cough cough The Gallows Pole cough.)

Here's the series' synopsis.

The Listeners is a taut thriller centered around Claire, a popular English teacher, who begins to hear a low humming sound that no one else around her can hear. This seemingly innocuous noise gradually upsets the balance of her life, increasing tension between herself and her husband, Paul, and daughter, Ashley. But despite multiple doctors, no obvious source or medical cause can be found. When she discovers that a student of hers, Kyle (Ollie West), can also hear the sound, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families, friends and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of neighbours, led by a charismatic couple, Jo and Omar, who also claim they can hear The Hum – and who believe it could be a gift, heard only by a “chosen few.”

“The Listeners pulls viewers in from the start with its unique mystery while provoking questions about how society treats and believes women’s experiences,”  Alison Hoffman, President of STARZ Networks, said. “We’re proud to bring this critically acclaimed project to the U.S. and expand our suite of premium programming for women with this riveting psychological thriller."

Tannahilm adapts his own novel for the screen, which is directed by Janicza Bravo (Too Much). Both also serve as executive producers, alongside Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Chelsea Morgan Hoffmann and Rachel Dargavel for Element Pictures, Rebecca Ferguson for the BBC, and Alice Birch. Ed King is series producer.

The Listeners will premiere on Starz at a later date in 2026.