Six Four

Six Four is a four-part British crime drama broadcast on ITVX from 30 March 2023, created by screenwriter Gregory Burke and directed by Ben A. Williams. Produced by House Productions, it adapts Hideo Yokoyama's best-selling Japanese novel of the same name to a Scottish setting, following a Glasgow police detective and his wife, a former undercover officer, as they search for their missing teenage daughter and reopen an infamous unsolved case.¹

The source novel

Hideo Yokoyama's novel was first published in Japan as Rokuyon in 2012 and translated into English by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies.² The English edition runs 576 pages and is set in 2003 in one of Japan's prefectures, where Superintendent Yoshinobu Mikami, transferred from criminal investigations to media relations, contends with an unhappy press while the unsolved kidnapping and murder of a seven-year-old girl 14 years earlier resurfaces and his own teenage daughter, Ayumi, has been missing for weeks.⁶ The book sold more than a million copies in Japan and was adapted both for film and for television.⁷ The two-part Japanese film adaptation, directed by Zeze Takahisa and starring Sato Koichi, was distributed by TOHO.⁸

Screenwriter Gregory Burke made major changes in adapting the story. The largest is location: the Japanese setting became Scotland, particularly Glasgow, with the protagonist renamed Chris O'Neill.^{4 • 9} Burke argued that enough parallels existed between British and Japanese society to justify the transplant, citing institutional inertia and the dilemma of whether loyalty within an institution inevitably leads to a compromise with the truth.⁹

Title meaning

The title is retained from the novel even though the setting moved to Scotland. It refers to Shōwa 64, the sixty-fourth year of the Shōwa era in the Japanese Imperial calendar, which corresponds to 1989 in the Gregorian calendar; this is the year in which the original cold case takes place.⁴

Production and filming

Principal photography began on 23 May 2022 and ran until 5 August 2022, with cinematographer Mattias Nyberg joining director Ben A. Williams in preproduction from mid-April.¹⁰ Most of the series was shot on location in Glasgow and Edinburgh, with additional locations across Scotland.⁴

Glasgow locations included West End Police Station on Vincent Street Lane, Glasgow Central Station, Bothwell Street, the Hotel Novotel, and Club 3000 Bingo in Coatbridge. Edinburgh locations included the City Morgue and High School Wynd on the Cowgate, Waverley Station, the Scotsman Steps, Niddry Street, North Bridge, and Fleshmarket Close. Further locations included Beecraigs Country Park, Newbattle Abbey College, cottages at Wanlockhead, Glenmuckloch Quarry, and New College Lanarkshire in Motherwell.⁴

Shooting at four major train stations, Edinburgh Waverley, Glasgow Central, London Euston, and King's Cross St Pancras, was among the most complex work; Williams had to direct the Waverley scenes over Zoom because he had COVID during that shoot. A remote cottage in the Southern Uplands and the small, windowless cell set for the kidnapped girl Annabel also posed particular lighting challenges.¹⁰

Screen Scotland supported the production with £500,000 of Production Growth Funding to base it in Scotland, supporting opportunities for Scottish crew, talent, and trainees.³

Broadcast and reception

The full series was released on ITVX on 30 March 2023.¹ The four episodes were later broadcast weekly on STV/ITV1 from Sunday 22 October 2023, with the conclusion airing 12 November.¹¹ The series has also streamed on SBS On Demand in Australia and on BritBox.^{12 • 13}

Reception was mixed. The Evening Standard gave the show four stars out of five, praising its twisty plot, steady pacing, and performances, particularly McKidd's first UK-based TV lead in decades and Richard Coyle's Justice Minister.^{11 • 5} The Telegraph's Anita Singh wrote that the series was "aiming for bleak but it comes across as dreary", while Gerard Gilbert in The i called it "a lot better than its over-familiar synopsis" and evidence that "there's life still in this terribly overworked genre".¹⁴ The show holds a 6.1 rating on IMDb.¹³

The British Board of Film Classification rated the episodes for physical media and streaming, noting infrequent strong threat, strong language, moderate violence, and, in the concluding episode, a bloody shooting and a scene of suicide.¹⁵

References

1. Six Four, ITV Press Centre
2. Andrew Pepper, "Secrecy and Transparency in Hideo Yokoyama's Six Four", Queen's University Belfast
3. Six Four, Screen Scotland
4. Where is Six Four filmed? Scotland filming locations, NationalWorld
5. Six Four on ITVX review, The Evening Standard
6. Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama, Publishers Weekly
7. Review: Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama, Time
8. 64-ロクヨン- 前編, Japanese Film Database
9. Behind the scenes of ITV's new police drama Six Four, The Evening Standard
10. Mattias Nyberg BSC / Six Four, British Cinematographer
11. Six Four: Everything you need to know, The Scotsman
12. Watch Six Four, SBS On Demand
13. Six Four where to stream in Australia, CompareTV
14. Wellmania; Six Four, Broadcast critics roundup
15. Six Four, British Board of Film Classification

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Scripted television and comedy series › Adapted and franchise screen series › Literary and classic serial adaptations › Thriller and crime adaptations › Premiered 1962 to 2023

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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