Real-Life British Drama on AppleTV+ Has Fans Saying 'This Can't Be True'

It’s a known fact that most of the stories created on TV are totally fictional. However, the creators also often turn to real-life events in order to find inspiration for their future series. Sometimes a single event or a name can be enough to build your own new story and after that create something totally different.

It’s a whole other story when a series is actually based on a true event that took place sometime before. Mostly these are period dramas about a particular time in history, or a specific person’s life. Sometimes though, shows focus on famous crime stories that happened before.

Now it feels like a new trend is created: turning a real-life miscarriage of justice in society into a TV series. One of the most perfect examples of such is actually a British series called Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

The series premiered on January 1 in 2024 and only lasted for four episodes. But even that was enough to make people fall in love with the idea and the way the story was told and turn the series into a Rotten Tomatoes hit with 93% score.

The show focuses on the infamous British Post Office scandal. Back in 2009, hundreds of postal workers were wrongly prosecuted privately and publicly for theft, false accounting or fraud because of a faulty computer system called Horizon.

The prosecutions and convictions are later ruled a miscarriage of justice at the conclusion of the Bates v Post Office judicial case of 2019. Thus comes the name of the series, directed by James Strong and starring an ensemble cast led by Toby Jones.

There are so many wrecked lives shown in the series and the story is so heart wrenching that the fans of it are pleased with the fact that the series had a huge social impact.

“I'm glad this program has struck a nerve with the British public and spurned further action to correct this massive miscarriage of justice... It's just a shame it's taken a TV show to force the current government into action 5 whole years after the 2019 group legal action exposed the real cause of the accounting problem,” Redditor jonathanquirk said.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office initially aired on ITV and now is available to stream on AppleTV+.