General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Passenger

Passenger is a British supernatural crime thriller television series created and written by the actor Andrew Buchan in his screenwriting debut, broadcast on ITV1 and ITVX from 24 March 2024 and streamed internationally on BritBox. Set in the fictional northern village of Chadder Vale, it follows Detective Inspector Riya Ajunwa, played by Wunmi Mosaku, as she investigates the disappearance and inexplicable return of a local girl while strange and increasingly horrific crimes unsettle the close-knit community.¹^•² The title has also been used by several unrelated screen works, including a 2026 Paramount horror film and a 2023 MGM+ thriller, which are described at the end of this article.

Key fact	Detail
Format	Six episodes¹
First broadcast	Sunday 24 March 2024 on ITV1 and ITVX; episode two aired Monday 25 March, with the remaining four episodes in the same Sunday/Monday slots over the following fortnight¹^•²
Creator and writer	Andrew Buchan, a Broadchurch actor, in his screenwriting debut¹^•³
Lead cast	Wunmi Mosaku as DI Riya Ajunwa; David Threlfall as fracking-site manager Jim Bracknell; Barry Sloane as Eddie Wells; Rowan Robinson as Katie Wells¹^•²
Directors	Lee Haven Jones and Nicole Charles¹
Production	SISTER in association with Northern Sister; executive producers Lucy Dyke, Simon Maloney and Jane Featherstone; distributed by All3Media International¹
Setting	Chadder Vale, a fictional village on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border⁴

Spoilers

Premise

Riya Ajunwa is a former Metropolitan Police detective who moved to Chadder Vale five years before the story begins, following her husband to his hometown. After the marriage fails, she cares for his mother while her caseload consists mostly of petty local matters such as missing bins and, occasionally, cats. She has been searching for the "one big crime" that will make her feel alive again.¹^•³

The inciting case. One night the local girl Katie Wells is mysteriously abducted; her car is found abandoned with traces of blood on the seats. The village barely registers the disappearance before Katie reappears the next day, safe and sound, 24 hours after she vanished. The residents ask few questions and life resumes, but Riya, a relative outsider, is not convinced, and Katie will not tell her what happened in the forest.¹^•⁴

As a series of strange happenings and increasingly horrific crimes unfolds, the residents resort to short-sighted theories and blame outside influences, while Riya fights to convince them that all is not as it seems and is eventually drawn into a universe unlike anything she has seen.¹ The mystery threads connect the disappearances of young people to the local fracking site and an old tree on the town's outskirts, alongside a dead stag on the forest road obliterated "by someone. Or something," and the release from prison of Eddie Wells, Katie's father, whom Riya locked up five years earlier for a drunken crime against Jim Bracknell.⁴

Cast and characters

Wunmi Mosaku as DI Riya Ajunwa, the former Met detective and series lead²
David Threlfall as Jim Bracknell, the unpopular manager of a fracking site near Chadder Vale²
Rowan Robinson as Katie Wells, the girl who vanishes temporarily and inexplicably²
Barry Sloane as Eddie Wells, Katie's father, recently released from prison²
Natalie Gavin as Joanne Wells, Eddie's wife²
Arian Nik and Ella Bruccoleri as trainee officers Nish Chowdry and Ali Day²
Jo Hartley as Chief Constable Linda Markel²
Daniel Ryan as Derek Jackson, who runs the local bread factory⁴

Production

ITV picked up Buchan's debut script in March 2022 as a joint production between BritBox International and ITV; it was the second series ITV took that year from an actor turning screenwriter, after Suranne Jones's family drama Maryland. Production began in February 2023, with filming in Cornholme, north of Manchester; IMDb lists Todmorden, West Yorkshire, as a filming location.⁵^•⁶ Wunmi Mosaku, known for Luther, Lovecraft Country and Loki, was announced as the lead when filming commenced.⁵

Executive producer Lucy Dyke of SISTER described the show as "a mystery thriller set in a small town just to the north of Manchester" about the community, a police officer, and strange things happening in the forest. She noted that Buchan had worked with Jane Featherstone for many years on Broadchurch and that Passenger was the first thing he had ever written.⁴

The British Board of Film Classification classified the six season-one episodes in March 2024 at roughly 46 minutes each, with content advice covering strong language, gory images of a killed and beheaded stag, and moderate horror scenes.⁷

Reception

The Guardian's Lucy Mangan called the series "confident, atmospheric and packed with creepy realism" and "a convincingly detail-oriented paranormal horror," while noting moments that pulled her out of the story, such as Riya's oddly unbothered reaction to the blood in Katie's car.³ The Times praised the well-written characters and dialogue; Den of Geek called it "comedic and sinister, with a terrific cast led by Wunmi Mosaku" and "a top binge-watch"; The Independent was more mixed, criticizing the show's surfeit of story threads and lack of the sparseness of great crime drama.² Radio Times gave it four stars out of five, describing it as hard to fit into any single genre category and praising its character study of close-knit English towns.⁸ On IMDb the series holds a rating of 5.8 out of 10 from about 2,500 users.⁶

Reviewers frequently placed the show in a lineage of small-town strangeness: Den of Geek invoked Twin Peaks, Happy Valley, and Stranger Things, while the Yahoo review called it "Happy Valley meets Twin Peaks in delightfully weird crime drama."⁹^•¹⁰

Other works titled Passenger

Several unrelated screen works share the title.

Passenger (2026 film). A supernatural horror film directed by André Øvredal, starring Jacob Scipio, Lou Llobell, and Melissa Leo. A young couple living in a van witness a gruesome highway accident and are pursued by a demonic entity called the Passenger. Paramount Pictures released it theatrically in the United States on 22 May 2026, with releases in Malaysia on 28 May and India on 29 May, and it premiered on Paramount+ in the United States on 20 August 2026. Empire Magazine praised its "memorable scares," while other reviews, including The Guardian's, were negative.¹¹^•¹²^•¹³

The Passenger (2023 film). An MGM+ thriller, 120 minutes long, which premiered on 4 August 2023. It stars Kyle Gallner as Benson and Johnny Berchtold as Randy, a coworker forced to confront his troubled past after Benson goes on a violent rampage.¹⁴

The Passenger (2026 thriller). A mystery thriller directed by Vadim Perelman, running 1 hour 32 minutes, in which a struggling airport shuttle driver in Minneapolis, played by Djimon Hounsou, illegally takes a stranded twenty-something, played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, to Chicago. It streams on Prime Video.¹⁵

Passengers (2020–2022). A Russian drama-mystery series, original title Passazhiry, created by Ruslan Sorokin and starring Kirill Käro, produced by START Studio, with 30-minute episodes about a taxi driver with strange clients.¹⁶

The ITV series should also not be confused with the earlier British reality series Passengers, which ran on Channel 4 in the 1990s and was revived in the early 2000s.⁵

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) › Science fiction, horror, and supernatural

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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