Toxic?:- Deadwater Fell.

A car crash, a dysfunctional marriage, a shouting match at a family fundraiser following a funeral, and three small children and their mother burning to death in their own home! Whose bright idea was it to screen Channel 4's recent, and, brilliant, four part thriller Deadwater Fell on Friday evening? Nobody could go straight to bed after watching that for fear of nightmares? I had to watch at least one episode of The Last Leg just to calm me down. Others reported watching Dracula afterwards for some light relief.

Despite being set in a leafy, verdant, seemingly well-to-do village in Scotland, the omens that all will not be well are there from the very start. The scenes of cute kids in hi-viz doing craft, cheerful locals waving little Scottish flags as a bike race passes through the village, and friendly local bobbies are juxtaposed with old boots, crabs, classrooms empty bar the sound of ghostly children's voices, and the aftermath of an obviously horrendous disaster leave you unsettled from the off, and the journey doesn't get much easier.

Tom Kendrick (David Tennant looking, initially at least, like a schoolmasterly folk singer) and his wife Kate (Anna Madeley) are at a ceilidh with their friends Steve (Michael McNulty) and Jess (the fantastically named Cush Jumbo) and these four, along with Tom's mum Carol (Maureen Beattie) will become the beating heart of a drama that skilfully manages to wrongfoot the viewer at almost every turn.

The ceilidh looks fun. There's booze. There's balloons. There are kids running around gaily. But these scenes of fun and normality are interspersed with something very very different. A fire. A very very bad fire. A fire that kills Kate and her three daughters (Charlotte, Iris, and Emily) and leaves Tom fighting for his life in hospital.

A teacher is given the impossible job of explaining to the rest of the kids at the village school that Charlotte, Iris, and Emily won't be coming in anymore but that they're "all together with their mummy now" and the scene is difficult to get through without welling up. I bawled my eyes out then and also when two young policemen were tasked with informing the rest of the family. But even that was as nothing compared to the unbearably sad sight of three small, and full, body bags lying outside the front of a house that would have been previously full of the sound of the laughter of those poor girls.

The grief is handled adroitly but it's a tough watch. Flashbacks to happier times only make the sadness more pointed and soon they become interspersed with scenes set in hospitals and police stations as the story moves both backwards and forwards and the secrets and lies of the chief protagonists', and soon (in some cases) suspects', lives slowly seep out leaving an atmosphere of anxiety, distrust, and powerful suspicion.

An autopsy finds pine needles in Emily's feet and pyjamas and it's also revealed that she'd been, along with her sisters, injected with something, a poison of some type. It's also discovered a padlock had been put on the door of the girls' bedroom before the fire and there's an absolutely chilling scene in which CCTV footage shows one of the parents buying a padlock.

A chill down my back and tears down my cheeks. All within the first hour. All in the first episode Fucking hell. Intense stuff. If the drama never quite hit the heights of emotion in the next three installments that's in no way to suggest that the quality of Deadwater Fell in anyway dipped. The show moved into the realms of a whodunnit while, at the same, acting as some kind of meditation on, and critique of, toxic masculinity.

Grief, envy, and drunkenness give way to accusations and heated arguments, romantic relationships and friendships are strained, and we're shown the difficult, and grubby, reality behind the respectable veneer of the beautiful houses and seemingly picture perfect lives. Affairs, post-natal depression, and occasional lapses into booze fuelled sexual jealousy provide the heat of the drama and bring an army of skeletons marching out of the cupboard while more sober scenes of police officers searching computer files and beige sofas in anonymous and bland corporate spaces bring the light which, ever so gradually and uncertainly, drags the narrative out of the darkness.

Incidental parts of the storyline are weaved, masterfully, into the main plot. Jess and Steve are on their 2nd round of IVF while Steve's ex-partner Sandra (Lisa McGrillis) and her new, much younger, boyfriend announce, tactlessly, that they're expecting. Flashbacks to a family and friends seaside outing reveal some of the roots of the tension that plagues almost every major relationship in the series.

Two characters make a big impact on the story. First there is Dylan (Lewis Gribben), a textbook example of a bored and troubled teenager frustrated in, and with, his small, safe, world. We regularly see him drunk, wandering about in his tight white pants, and when he's not mouthing off to the police he's being taken in by them. Secondly, there is Sacha (Seline Hizli), a former friend of Kate's from teacher training who, in disclosing some of her own history to Jess, sheds further light on the marriage of Tom and Kate.

Or does she? In some ways her revelations obfuscate things even further and as this series twists and turns its way to what you know will be an excruciatingly tense denouement you're never, not at least until very very near the end, sure how it's all going to turn out.

That's to the testament of the writing of Daisy Coulam and the direction of Lynsey Miller but also to the performances of Tennant, Madeley, Jumbo, and McNulty who, like everybody else involved, are superb and believable throughout. It was a gripping, sad, and frustratingly tense series but it was an absolutely brilliant one that had me utterly absorbed from start to finish.

Like a modern day riff on An Inspector Calls, we see each characters' motivation but we also see their weaknesses and their doubts and when it tackles toxic male behaviour it doesn't do so in a lazy, perfomative, or instructive way. It does so almost matter of factly. This is how men sometimes behave and this is what happens when men behave that way. This is who gets hurt. Everybody.

Deadwater Fell (which many compared to a show I didn't watch:- Broadchurch, presumably because of Tennant's involvement) made good use of its small village location to show that those who live so closely intertwined with their friends, family, and neighbours can, at times of great intensity, feel under even more pressure because everyone they speak to, everyone they see, has some direct personal involvement with events.

Impartiality is in short supply. Small moments like a eulogy which mentions Charlotte's love of saving bees, the look of pain in a cuckolded lover's eyes, and, horrifically, a vandalised and defaced memorial to one of the fire's victims give the events a veracity that we can all identify with, even when the horror is, thankfully, far removed from anything most of us will ever experience.

I shivered, I cried, and I watched in horror as this story unfolded in front me but I also watched in delight at the sheer brilliance of the whole thing. Last year I described Shane Meadows' The Virtues as "one of the most brilliant, tender, moving, and, at all times, completely real pieces of television I have ever seen". Deadwater Fell belongs in that exalted company. Wow!