The Town
- 6.7
- Drama
- 2012
- 1h
- 14+
a three-part British crime-drama created by Mike Bartlett and starring Andrew Scott, Martin Clunes and Julia McKenzie. When a man returns to his hometown following his parents’ mysterious deaths, he uncovers secrets behind the town’s facade, and discovers that returning home may be the hardest journey of all
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In the cold December air of a small English town called Renton, the death of a couple in a suspected suicide pact fractures expectations and sets in motion a chain of secrets and return. Twenty-nine-year-old Mark Nicholas arrives back from London to his childhood home, the place he thought he’d left behind, to support his sister Jodie and grandmother Betty as they face the unthinkable. But the town he returns to is not the town he remembers: streets lined with familiar shops hide silences, friends from school act distant, family ties are frayed by absence, and the words “I Know” appear scrawled on scraps of paper trimmed from notebook margins and mobile phones alike. In The Town (2012) the mystery is never just the deaths but the unraveling of memory, identity and belonging.
Mark’s investigation begins as a gesture of support, but soon becomes something deeper and darker. His sister Jodie, still only fifteen, shifts from needing protection to needing answers of her own, her teenage defiance sharpened by shock and suspicion. Their grandmother Betty, once matriarch of the household, becomes a witness to her past as she realises Mark’s childhood bedroom has been occupied, layer upon layer of memories crowded in. Meanwhile, Len Robson, the mayor of Renton and a man revered locally, hides both alcoholism and ambition, his public speeches sparking sympathy but his private life brimming with compromises. The man who should be protector becomes a gatekeeper of secrets.
As Mark and Jodie walk through their heritage — funerals that feel rehearsed, friends who refuse to remember, council offices where their mother used to work — the show constructs not an easy mystery but a layered portrait of a town that’s settled and stifled. The letters “I Know” become both accusation and confession, a symbol of hidden knowledge and silent guilt. Inspector Chris Franks — who once had an affair with Mark’s mother Kate — enters the frame as both suspect and saviour, reinforcing how deeply personal this investigation has become. In a town built on relationships that pre-booked themselves and loyalties inherited, Mark senses that to uncover truth may mean losing the home he returned to.
By the final episode, the boundaries between family and town blur. Jodie finds freedom not in escape but in reshaping her connection to the place, and Mark realises the return he sought has become a reckoning. The death of their parents, the hit-and-run that killed Len’s teenage son, the affair his mother kept — they all cohere into a delicate web. The Town closes on the understanding that home is not the place you leave, nor the place you come back to unchanged: it is the memories you carry, the questions you raise, the revelation you cannot silence. The town stands still — but those who live there do not. Through its three episodes, The Town turns a small community into a gallery of secrets, its streets into corridors of memory, its institutions into puzzles of power. The show’s quiet pace, the crisp English winter air, the anonymous high street of High Wycombe standing in for Renton — they combine to make a world where clarity hides behind the everyday and the dead speak louder than the living. Mark’s return is not triumphant but tentative; his homecoming is not return but reinvention.