ITV’s Red Eye is back, and it hasn’t lost any of its nerve. The propulsive thriller returns for a second six-part run with a bigger canvas, a deeper conspiracy and a smart piece of casting in Martin Compston, joining Jing Lusi’s quietly magnetic DS Hana Li.
If series one felt like Agatha Christie at 35,000 feet, series two expands the flight path into full-blown geopolitical paranoia.
Launched last year to more than eight million viewers and nearly 30 million streams on ITVX, Red Eye became one of the broadcaster’s standout dramas of 2024 – proof that glossy, high-concept thrillers can still thrive on terrestrial TV when executed with confidence.
Written and created by Peter A Dowling and produced by Bad Wolf, the show now returns with its ambitions not just intact, but sharpened.
Lusi reprises her role as Hana Li, the meticulous, emotionally guarded detective whose calm competence anchored the first series.
“Agatha Christie on a plane?” she has said of the show’s original appeal – a concept that felt strikingly different from the usual ITV drama fare. That sense of difference remains crucial. Red Eye looks and moves like prestige streaming drama, yet plays to a broad audience, unafraid of twists, jeopardy and cliffhangers.
Joining her is Compston as Clay Brody, a Regional Security Officer at the US Embassy in London – and a man with a complicated history with Hana.
It’s a role that plays neatly to Compston’s strengths: tightly wound authority, moral ambiguity, and the sense of a man used to command. “Classic cops-and-robbers fun,” he calls it, clearly relishing the return to the 9pm slot. There’s a knowing pleasure here in wrist radios, urgent whispers and people vanishing down corridors at speed – television that understands its own thrills.
Lesley Sharp and Jemma Moore also return as MI5 chief Madeline Delaney and journalist Jess Li, grounding the drama in institutional pressure and media scrutiny.
As ever with Bad Wolf productions, the scale is impressive without feeling indulgent: embassies, aircraft cabins, secret tunnels and secure rooms all pressed into service as pressure cookers for the plot.
The opening episode wastes little time. Eighteen months after Russia is blamed for shooting down a D-300 cargo plane over the Atlantic, Hana is pulled into the murder of a US diplomatic courier at Heathrow. His diplomatic bag is missing.
His killer, known only as Fox, is already moving again. The trail leads to the US Embassy, where an ambassadorial party becomes the setting for a deadly infiltration – and a sudden disappearance into secret underground passageways.
At the same time, Delaney finds herself trapped aboard a government jet from Washington DC, facing a chilling Russian threat: descend below 20,000 feet and the plane will explode.
They can’t turn back. They can’t change course. The tension is pure Red Eye – contained spaces, impossible choices, and a clock ticking loudly in the background.
Directed once again by Kieron Hawkes (episodes one to three), with Camilla Strøm Henriksen taking over for the latter half, the series maintains a clean, muscular visual style that prioritises momentum.
There’s no flab here, just steadily escalating stakes and characters forced into increasingly compromised positions.
Fast, confident and unashamedly thrilling, Red Eye’s second series proves that ITV drama still has plenty of fuel left in the tank.
Red Eye returns to ITV1 and STV at 9pm on New Year’s Day with the series streaming on ITVX and STV Player
