General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Breathtaking

Breathtaking is a three-part British television drama, first broadcast on ITV1 and ITVX in February 2024, that follows an NHS acute medicine consultant and her colleagues through the first wave and second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. It stars Joanne Froggatt as Dr Abbey Henderson and is based on the memoir Breathtaking by the palliative-care doctor and writer Rachel Clarke, adapted for television by Clarke, Jed Mercurio, and Prasanna Puwanarajah and directed by Craig Viveiros.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Three 60-minute episodes, ITV1 and ITVX, 19 to 21 February 2024³^•⁴
Episode titles	Containment, Delay, Mitigation³
Lead role	Joanne Froggatt as Dr Abbey Henderson, an acute medicine consultant and mother of two²^•¹
Source	Rachel Clarke's memoir Breathtaking, begun as a personal diary during the pandemic's first wave in spring 2020⁵
Production	HTM Television, produced in association with Northern Ireland Screen; filmed in Belfast¹
Audience	Launched to 5.9 million viewers and generated 7.5 million streams on ITVX²
Recognition	Nominated for Limited Series and Single Drama at the 2025 RTS Programme Awards; production designer Ashleigh Jeffers received a BAFTA Television Craft Award nomination²

Spoilers

Premise and story

The drama is set in a fictional big-city hospital during the early months of the pandemic. Abbey Henderson, known for her calm approach in a crisis, witnesses the virus take hold as it overwhelms the NHS. As Covid patients flood the hospital, staff battle shortages of PPE, beds, and personnel while being forced to make decisions about who can receive treatment.¹^•²

The three episodes chronicle the pandemic from the first Covid cases to the second wave in January 2021, which was fueled by a new variant and Christmas socialising. Abbey and her team witness the consequences of inadequate protection, care-home discharges, and rapidly changing government guidance, and several staff members become infected themselves. When the second wave arrives, accompanied by exhaustion, public hostility, and Covid denial, Abbey reaches breaking point and risks her career by speaking out about what happened inside Britain's hospitals.⁵^•²

The episode titles trace the official response: Containment, in the lead-up to the UK's first national lockdown, as the team runs out of tests and adapts to unclear, ever-changing guidelines; Delay, as patients get sicker during the first wave; and Mitigation, as a new winter wave becomes unmanageable.³

Origins and writing

The source book began as a diary Clarke kept for herself during the pandemic's first wave in spring 2020, which she describes as a traumatic experience she found therapeutic to write down. She started writing the book that first summer, after the news in May 2020 that Dominic Cummings had driven to County Durham during lockdown left her incensed and convinced her that what she had witnessed inside hospitals needed to be recorded.⁵

All three screenwriters have medical backgrounds. Clarke continues to practice in palliative care and had earlier worked as a TV current affairs journalist before qualifying as a doctor in 2009. Puwanarah, a former NHS doctor in Oxford who met Clarke more than 15 years ago, had left medicine for a career in theater, film, and television, including playing Martin Bashir in The Crown. Mercurio was a junior hospital doctor from 1991 to 1994, working in acute medicine in the West Midlands, before turning to television writing with Cardiac Arrest, Bodies, and Critical, and later Line of Duty and Bodyguard.⁵^•⁶

The spine of the drama is Clarke's book, but the scripts also draw on testimonies from other healthcare professionals, with invented characters used to bring those stories together. Puwanarajah describes the method as character composites and the dramatisation of journalistically sourced material, rather than fictionalisation. Clarke has said that in many ways Abbey is her: her reactions to events, her growing anger, and her desire to do something about it.⁵

Production

The series was produced by Jed Mercurio's company HTM Television, in association with Northern Ireland Screen, and filmed in Belfast; it is distributed internationally by ITV Studios.¹ Brian J. Falconer produced, with Mercurio, Clarke, Puwanarajah, and Jimmy Mulville among the executive producers.²

Director Craig Viveiros said he avoided watching medical dramas before the shoot so as not to fall into their tropes, and instead looked at war dramas, finding the overworked, under-resourced Covid frontline comparable to a war zone. Ahead of the six weeks of filming, a week-long boot camp was attended by the cast, extras, and medical staff so that they could ready themselves for the film's key hospital sequences. Production designer Ashleigh Jeffers built a set in three weeks inside a disused university building at Jordanstown outside Belfast, allowing the camera to move freely through the space. Takes were frequently long, with real-time sequences of 10 to 12 minutes coordinating up to 70 to 100 people at a time.⁵

A medical team, principally Dr Thom Petty and Dr Andrew Cinnamond, ensured clinical accuracy, with three medical advisers on set at any one time and often five medical heads in the room once Mercurio and Puwanarajah were present. The production also spliced in real news footage, and the drama is peppered with archive footage of government ministers.⁵^•⁷

Reception and impact

The series launched to 5.9 million viewers and generated 7.5 million streams on ITVX, forming part of ITV Drama's strongest start to a year in six years.² On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an average Tomatometer score of 88 percent from 8 reviews.⁸ It was subsequently nominated for Limited Series and Single Drama at the 2025 RTS Programme Awards, and Ashleigh Jeffers received a BAFTA Television Craft Award nomination for production design.²

Clarke and Puwanarajah framed the series as a public interest drama, pointing to the political impact of Mr Bates vs the Post Office as evidence that a story told well on screen can move public opinion. Clarke cited about 230,000 Covid deaths in the UK even with lockdowns, and said the drama was made so that people look at what happened and remember it, because there will be another pandemic.⁵

Cast

Joanne Froggatt, a Golden Globe winner known for Downton Abbey and Sherwood, leads as Dr Abbey Henderson. The cast includes Christopher Hatherall as Nick Henderson, Bhav Joshi as Dr Ant Vyas, and Donna Banya, Jodie McNee, Philip Arditti, and Mary Woodvine among others.²^•⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Genre and subject-scripted series › Medical drama series

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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