As WW2 rages around the world, DCS Foyle fights his own war on the home-front as he investigates crimes on the south coast of England. Foyle's War opens in southern England in the year 1940. Later series sees the retired detective working as an MI5 agent operating in the aftermath of the war.
Latest episode: S9 E3 Elise (Jan 18, 2015)
The series begins in May 1940, a time when local Germans are being interned, the bombing of England has commenced, and anti-German feelings are running high. Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle's request for a service transfer is again denied, and he returns to local police work in Hastings. First broadcast in 2002 and covers the Spring/Summer of 1940.
It's Autumn, 1940, and DCS Foyle is once again thrust into the goings on around Hastings and beyond, investigating murder and other crimes committed during this time of war.
Set in Spring of 1941, once again we find ourselves in the midsts of mayhem and madness, as Foyle must determine the right from wrong in his home town. Even the war cannot prevent him from uncovering the truth behind organized crime, deserters and sabotage. First aired in 2004.
Covering the long year from April 1944 to May 1945, where the end of World War II slowly but inevitably approaches, Foyle and his fellow citizens learn the price of victory and face a peace that will transform their lives in unexpected ways.
We find Foyle in the Summer of 1945, In the immediate aftermath of World War II. Our Police detective now finds his longed-for retirement interrupted by cases of a different sort, involving international intrigue, military racism, and an accused traitor all too willing to go to the gallows.
World War II is over, but the Cold War simmers in the height of the 1946 London Summer. DCS Christopher Foyle has retired from police work when Britain's secret intelligence service compels him to join its ranks. Reunited with his former colleague, newlywed Sam Wainwright, Foyle faces new-but no less deadly-threats in the world of spies and counterintelligence.
The acclaimed detective series returns with more mysteries set in the uncertain days at the beginning of the Cold War. In the Autumn of 1946, former DCS Christopher Foyle now employs his unerring investigative skills in London on behalf of MI5, assisted by his ever-faithful driver, Sam Wainwright.
There’s a particular pleasure in Foyle’s War that I don’t think we talk about enough: it doesn’t merely place crime inside wartime, it asks what happens to morality when everyone is too busy surviving to notice the small rot in the wallpaper. The series opens in 1940, on the south coast of England, and that setting does a lot of heavy lifting. Air raid sirens, rationing, evacuees, blackouts — all the familiar machinery of the Home Front — are there, but the show is less interested in pageantry than in the way war rearranges ordinary life.
A stolen ham, a murdered clerk, a compromised factory, a missing body. In another drama these would be procedural details. Here they feel like symptoms.
What makes the series so sturdy is that it never confuses atmosphere with thought. Yes, it has the sepia-toned elegance we expect from prestige British period drama, but it’s not decorative about its history. Created by Anthony Horowitz, Foyle’s War arrived in 2002 with a premise that could have curdled into neat nostalgia — detective stories in wartime, each episode a carefully lit parable of national character.
Instead, Horowitz uses the structure to keep asking awkward questions: Who gets protected by the state? Who is expendable? What does patriotism excuse?
That’s the real conversation the series has been having for years, and it’s why it’s endured well beyond the novelty of the setup.
Michael Kitchen’s Christopher Foyle is the key to that endurance. He plays the detective as a man who seems permanently in the act of withholding a reaction. I’m not sure I can think of another lead in crime television who does so much with such little visible effort.
Kitchen’s face is all restraint and dry weather; his pauses are as expressive as other actors’ speeches. He doesn’t stride through scenes so much as arrive in them already tired of everyone’s nonsense. That might sound glib, but it’s actually the source of the character’s authority.
Foyle isn’t the smartest man in the room because he’s performing intelligence. He’s smart because he’s patient, and because he notices what panic makes other people miss.
The other reason the series works is Honeysuckle Weeks, whose Samantha Stewart gives the show a pulse and, at times, a conscience. Weeks had already been visible in British film and television, but here she gets something rarer: a role that lets her move from flirtation to competence without the usual sitcom glow of “spunky girl” shorthand. Samantha can seem at first like a bright interruption in Foyle’s severe world, yet the writing and Weeks’s performance gradually reveal a sharper purpose.
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