Not Waving:The Drowning.

"The finest years I ever knew were all the years I had with you, and I would give anything I own, I'd give up my life, my heart, my home. I would give everything I own just to have you back again" - Everything I Own, Ken Boothe.

Grief cuts us deep inside from the first second we experience it. The pain is great but it doesn't stop there. Grief continues eating away at our soul long after the person we have lost has gone. Many of us, eventually, come out of it, the open wound becomes a scar and we resume, tentatively, our old life. But some don't. Some never really get over it. Some losses hurt too much, some cut too deep.

There can be no deeper grief than that which a mother feels for the loss of her child and, perhaps because of this, a rich seam of television drama has been created out of fictionalised versions of this grief in recent years. To Broadchurch and last year's Deadwater Fell we can now add Francesca Brill, Luke Watson, and Tim Dynevor's four part thriller The Drowning. Possibly the best drama I've ever seen on Channel 5. Although, to be fair, that's not the most competitive of fields to be operating in.

Although you will, at times, have to suspend disbelief, The Drowning is gripping, eerie, genuinely moving, and, until very near the end, you have no idea what direction the series is taking you in. It's half rollercoaster ride of raw emotion, heightened by a discordant score of often unsettling intensity, and half ghost train ride through a haunted landscape of familial secrets, repressed memories, betrayals, and regrets.

It makes for strong stuff. Jodie (Jill Halfpenny) is a landscape gardener whose son drowned in a lake nine years ago and whose body was never discovered. Those nine years of grief have, quite clearly, caused huge ructions in her relationships with her friends and family. Her husband Ben (Dara Devaney) has left her for her former best friend Kate (Deirdre Mullins) and neither mother Lynn (Deborah Findlay) or high-flying brother Jason (Jonas Armstrong) seem particularly sympathetic to Jodie's grief.

Or at least not to the way she chooses to express that grief. Driving her red Saab to a pitch for a gardening job at work she spots a teenage boy, Daniel (Cody Molko), walking to school with a guitar case, frizzy hair like her son Tom, and a scar under his left eye that looks exactly the same as the one Tom had after falling from a swing.

The police, mainly in the form of the extraordinarily casual D.S. Harvey (Jason Maza), don't seem interested so Jodie follows Daniel to school, ingratiates herself into his life and that of the man Daniel calls his dad - Mark (Rupert Penry-Jones). All of which, quite remarkably, doesn't get her put on some kind of register.

Jodie becomes so obsessed with Daniel/Tom that she refuses to pick up calls from her family, she oversteps the mark with both Daniel and Mark on numerous occasions, and her colleagues at work, Mr McKenzie (Conor Mullen) and, more so, Miss Towne (Roison O'Neill), soon grow suspicious of both her motives and her actions when she becomes, surprisingly easily, a music tutor.

Well, the ex-husband does have a recording studio in the shed in the garage. Even though the narrative isn't particularly realistic, it feels like it is and from the creepy opening titles to the final denouement the general atmosphere is one of unease, a sense of a disaster waiting to unfold with each new discovery.

There's a secondary subplot about Jodie and her partner Yasmin's (Jade Anouka) work colleague Ade (Babs Olusanmokun) who, as an illegal immigrant relying on falsified papers to keep his job, becomes embroiled with a violent band of gangmasters that could have been developed much further but, the odd chase scene and sense of mild peril aside, never really gets going and always plays second fiddle to Jodie's battle with both her grief and with the truth.

It's a battle we're never sure if she will win and in that, if little else, there is an air of veracity in The Drowning. As a television programme, The Drowning didn't really show us what grief, loss, and betrayal look like but it did an absolutely wonderful job of showing us what all those things feel like. The Drowning never felt like real life, it felt like a hyperreal impression of real life. But, as I recall from times I have spent in personal grief, when you're in that state of mind, life doesn't feel like life as much as it does a hyperreal impression of life. A wonderful, and lurid, evocation of a human mind and soul being forced through the wringer.