General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

One Night

One Night is a 2023 Australian six-part drama series created and written by Emily Ballou, in which three women are forced to relive the trauma of a night twenty years earlier when one of them publishes a novel about it¹. It premiered on Paramount+ in Australia on 1 September 2023² and stars Jodie Whittaker, Nicole da Silva, and Yael Stone³.

Key fact	Detail
Format	Six-part series, 6 x 52 minute episodes; genres drama and thriller¹
Premiere	1 September 2023, Paramount+ Australia²
Creator	Emily Ballou (The Slap, Taboo); directors Catherine Millar and Lisa Matthews⁴
Lead cast	Jodie Whittaker as Tess, Nicole da Silva as Simone, Yael Stone as Hat³
Production	Easy Tiger Productions and Motive Pictures, with major production investment from Screen Australia⁴
Filming	Sydney and the Illawarra region of New South Wales, from February 2023⁴
Reception	75% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (8 reviews); 6.7/10 on IMDb from about 1,400 users²^•⁵

Spoilers

Premise

The series follows three women whose bond was all but destroyed by the traumatic events of one night twenty years before the story begins⁴. Simone (Nicole da Silva), who has long harbored hopes of becoming a novelist, has finally written the one story she could never get out of her mind, and her debut manuscript becomes an unexpected overnight success⁴. The book is published anonymously⁶.

The problem is that the story does not exclusively belong to her. The tragedy at its heart also happened to her two childhood best friends, Tess (Jodie Whittaker) and Hat (Yael Stone), and their memories of the circumstances differ⁷. In the night that altered each of their lives, Tess fell victim to a horrific sexual assault and fled overseas to London; the three friends lost contact for twenty years and reunite as the book is about to be printed⁸.

Themes and approach

A psychological, not procedural, mystery. Ballou has described the series as a psychological mystery rather than a classic whodunnit: the things that need solving are personal to the characters, and there is no detective piecing together clues. The suspense comes instead from the group's shared memories and from how the characters interact after two decades apart⁸.

The central question is who has the right to tell a story that belongs to more than one person. Da Silva said the show tackles "what is memory and whose right is it to tell a story when something does happen to three people," noting that cases of assault and ownership of story had made the theme feel current⁷. A line Ballou singled out from the script has Hat tell Simone, "Just because you wrote a book about it, doesn't mean your memories are truer"⁹.

Part of Ballou's inspiration came from her own experience of writing a novel about her childhood, after which her younger sister, who remembers little of that childhood, asked whether the story was true or just her memories⁸.

Setting and production

Filming commenced in February 2023 in Sydney and the Illawarra region of New South Wales, with the small coastal town setting drawn from the Wollongong coastline⁴. Ballou, who traveled to the NSW south coast from Sydney in the early 2000s, said the landscape suited a story of hidden trauma, describing "a kind of Australian gothic" in the way the sun sets behind the escarpment and casts a long shadow over the road, houses, and beach⁸.

The series is a Paramount+ Australian Original produced by Easy Tiger Productions and Motive Pictures, with major production investment from Screen Australia in association with Paramount+; Fifth Season handled international sales⁴. The producers are Ian Collie, Rob Gibson, and Ally Henville, with Simon Maxwell as executive producer and Emily Ballou also serving as executive producer⁴.

Cast

Jodie Whittaker (Doctor Who, Broadchurch), Nicole da Silva (Doctor Doctor, Wentworth), and Yael Stone (Orange Is the New Black) lead the ensemble, which includes Kat Stewart (Five Bedrooms, Offspring), George Mason (The Power of the Dog), Erroll Shand, Noni Hazlehurst, Tina Bursill, William Zappa, Damien Strouthos, and Jillian Nguyen³. Whittaker plays Tess, who returns to Australia from England with her wife Vicki (Kat Stewart) after nearly two decades abroad⁶.

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes the series holds a 75% Tomatometer average from 8 reviews². Critics were divided on pacing. Lucy Mangan in The Guardian gave it 4 out of 5, calling the effect "very much of an Australian Big Little Lies," a female-centered story with ugly secrets beneath a beautiful surface¹⁰. Michael Hogan in The Daily Telegraph gave it 2 out of 5, writing that stretched over six episodes it "moves with all the urgency of an asthmatic koala"¹⁰. A Guardian review of the Australian premiere praised the cast as rock-solid, singling out Whittaker's escalating performance, while finding the plotting contrived¹¹. On IMDb the series holds 6.7/10 from about 1,400 user ratings⁵.

Distribution

After its Paramount+ run, the series became available on Netflix in Australia; as of September 2026, JustWatch listed it as streaming there on Netflix and Netflix Standard with Ads, with an MA15+ rating¹². The series was also released in the United Kingdom on Paramount+ in late 2023⁹.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Drama and prestige series (individual series) › Crime and thriller series › Psychological and domestic thrillers

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

Notice something wrong?