In the fog-shrouded corridors of 1960s London, where the clink of champagne flutes masked the rattle of Cold War sabers and the whispers of Westminster hid sins darker than a blackout raid, a scandal erupted that didn’t just topple a government—it shattered the illusions of an entire empire. Now, over six decades later, that seismic saga has clawed its way into the streaming spotlight with The Trial of Christine Keeler, the razor-sharp BBC miniseries that dropped on Netflix on October 15, 2025, after years of quiet acclaim on the BBC. This six-episode masterclass in moral ambiguity, helmed by screenwriter Amanda Coe and starring James Norton as the enigmatic osteopath Stephen Ward, isn’t just a retelling of the infamous Profumo Affair—it’s a scalpel dissecting the rotten core of power, privilege, and perfidy. Critics are already crowning it “darker, smarter, and more ruthless than The Night Manager,” a haunting tapestry of espionage, betrayal, and the brutal price of truth that leaves viewers questioning not just the characters’ loyalties, but their own complicity in the machinery of scandal. With a Rotten Tomatoes score hovering at 88% and binge-watchers flooding social media with “I can’t look away” confessions, The Trial of Christine Keeler arrives on Netflix like a time capsule cracked open in the dead of night—exhuming Britain’s dirtiest secret and daring us to stare into the abyss.

At its pulsating heart lies the Profumo Affair, a whirlwind of sex, spies, and shattered facades that gripped Britain in 1963 like a fever dream from which the nation never fully awoke. The story centers on Christine Keeler (Sophie Cookson, luminous and lacerating in a star-making turn), a 19-year-old showgirl and mannequin whose chance encounters with the elite would ignite a firestorm that singed the Conservative government and nearly dragged the monarchy into the flames. Introduced to the glittering underbelly of London by the charismatic Dr. Stephen Ward (Norton, slithering through the shadows with a serpent’s charm), Keeler becomes the unwitting fulcrum in a tangle of tangled affairs: her clandestine dalliance with Secretary of State for War John Profumo (Ben Miles, radiating patrician poise laced with panic), a married man whose bedroom indiscretions threaten national security when Keeler’s other paramour, Soviet naval attaché Captain Yevgeny Ivanov (Mate Haig, brooding with Bolshevik intensity), raises the specter of pillow talk passing to the Kremlin. What unfolds is a labyrinth of lies: Profumo’s initial denial in Parliament (“There was no impropriety whatsoever”), Ward’s desperate machinations to shield his “little baby” Christine from the fallout, and the tabloid frenzy that turns Keeler from ingénue to icon of infamy.

Coe’s script, a non-linear mosaic that jumps from the affair’s sultry spark to its courtroom conflagration, masterfully mirrors the chaos of the era—a Britain teetering between post-war pomp and pre-Swinging Sixties liberation, where class rigidity clashed with carnal cravings. Episode 1 plunges us into the Cliveden pool party, that infamous 1961 bacchanal at Lord Astor’s estate where Keeler emerges naked from the water like a siren from the Thames, her silhouette catching Profumo’s eye amid the splash of champagne and the splash of scandal. From there, the narrative fractures like a shattered looking glass: flashbacks to Keeler’s hardscrabble childhood in a converted railway carriage by the Thames, where poverty and predatory uncles forged her wary worldview; cutaways to Ward’s double life as society healer and sexual Svengali, pimping starlets to the powerful while sketching their sins in charcoal. The espionage element simmers like a slow poison: MI5’s frantic fumbling to quash the leak, their agents tailing Keeler through foggy back alleys as she juggles lovers and lies with the grace of a tightrope walker in a gale. By Episode 3, the web tightens—Johnny Edgecombe (Nathaniel Martello-White, volatile as a Vauxhall bomb) firing shots at Ward’s flat in a jealous rage, alerting the press to the powder keg primed to blow.

Norton’s Ward is the series’ sinister symphony conductor, a performance so layered it lingers like the aftertaste of absinthe—charming yet chilling, paternal yet predatory. Best known for his brooding vicar in Grantchester and the tormented Andrei in War & Peace, Norton slinks into Ward’s skin with a serpentine ease: his posh drawl dripping condescension as he coos “little baby” to Keeler, his eyes flickering with the fever of a man addicted to the thrill of the forbidden. “Stephen wasn’t a monster—he was a mirror,” Norton reflected in a recent Radio Times chat, his intensity undimmed by the role’s moral mire. “He embodied the era’s hypocrisies: healing the elite by day, hawking their vices by night. Playing him was like walking a wire over the abyss—exhilarating, terrifying.” It’s a portrayal that cuts deeper than Heath Ledger’s anarchic Joker or Tom Hiddleston’s suave spy in The Night Manager, blending psychological nuance with a ruthless edge that makes Ward’s courtroom crucifixion in Episode 5—a trumped-up trial for living off immoral earnings—a tragedy of tragicomic proportions. His overdose before the verdict, delivered in absentia to an empty dock, is a gut-punch finale that leaves you seething at the system’s selective blindness.

Cookson’s Keeler is the beating, bleeding heart of the storm—a revelation that catapults her from Kingsman‘s periphery to center stage with a ferocity that rivals Saoirse Ronan’s Lady Bird or Florence Pugh’s Amy March. At 28 during filming, the actress embodies the character’s contradictions: a wide-eyed ingenue hardened by hardship, her laughter light as champagne bubbles but her gaze heavy with the weight of exploitation. “Christine wasn’t a villain or a victim—she was a vortex,” Cookson told The Guardian, her poise belying the emotional excavation. “She was 19, navigating a world of wolves in Westminster suits. I drew from my own brushes with the industry— the gaze that undresses, the power that patronizes.” Her Keeler flits from Cliveden’s chlorinated revelry to the Old Bailey’s oak-paneled ordeal with a defiant grace, her testimony a tightrope of truth and evasion that exposes the affair’s underbelly: racism simmering in Edgecombe’s trial (a Black man jailed for shooting at Ward’s door), sexism staining Keeler’s character assassination (“loose woman” slurs from the bench), and the nuclear anxiety of the Cuban Missile Crisis looming like a guillotine over it all. Cookson’s chemistry with Norton crackles like a faulty fuse—tender trysts in Ward’s modernist flat giving way to tense interrogations that cut to the bone—while her scenes with Ellie Bamber’s Mandy Rice-Davies (the “other” showgirl, all bubbly bravado and biting wit) form a sisterhood forged in fire, their courtroom camaraderie a defiant “We won’t be silenced” to the suits in the gallery.

The ensemble is a veritable who’s-who of British thespian talent, each performance a polished gem in Coe’s intricate mosaic. Ben Miles’s Profumo is a portrait of patrician panic—his clipped consonants crumbling under cross-examination, his marriage to Valerie Hobson (Emilia Fox, frosty as a debutante’s fan) fracturing like fine china under the strain of his “no impropriety” fib. Fox’s Valerie is a revelation: the film-star wife whose public poise masks private fury, her “How could you?” confrontation in Episode 4 a masterclass in marital meltdown that rivals Marriage Story‘s rawest rifts. Ellie Bamber’s Mandy is the series’ sparkling counterpoint—bubbly yet barbed, her “He would, wouldn’t he?” courtroom quip a cultural zinger that still echoes in meme form. Supporting turns add depth and danger: Anton Lesser as the scheming MI5 chief John Lewis, his clipped commands chilling as a Cold War cipher; Nathan Byron as the volatile Johnny Edgecombe, his rage a raw indictment of racial injustice; and Neil Maskell as the shadowy Lucky Gordon, whose obsession spirals into stalking terror. Even smaller roles resonate: Buffy Davis as Labour MP Barbara Castle, her parliamentary parries a feminist foil to the male machinations; and Mark Gatiss as the oily press baron Lord Astor, his Cliveden bacchanal a bubbling cauldron of class warfare.

Coe’s writing, a non-linear fever dream that jumps from 1961’s poolside seduction to 1963’s trial tumult, is the series’ secret weapon—a structure that mirrors the affair’s disorienting domino effect, flashbacks fracturing like shattered champagne coupes to reveal the rot beneath the revelry. “I wanted to tell Christine’s story, not the men’s,” Coe explained in a Telegraph profile, her lens a feminist refracting prism on a saga long sanitized through scandal sheets. “The Profumo Affair wasn’t about a minister’s fall—it was about a woman’s weaponization.” The result is a narrative as cunning as a spy’s cipher: Episode 2’s interracial tryst between Keeler and Ivanov, a steamy splash in Ward’s modernist pool that flirts with treason, underscores the era’s racial undercurrents; Episode 4’s press frenzy, tabloids splashing “Whore of the War Office” headlines, lays bare the misogynistic meat grinder that ground Keeler’s agency to dust. Directors Leanne Welham and Andrea Harkin infuse the visuals with visceral verisimilitude: foggy Thames docks lit by sodium lamps, the Old Bailey’s vaulted gloom pressing down like judgment day, costumes by Kate Rhodes James that evolve from Keeler’s mod minis to courtroom blacks like a visual elegy for innocence lost.

Critics have been quick to anoint The Trial of Christine Keeler as the gold standard for scandal sagas, a sharper scalpel than The Night Manager‘s suave spycraft or A Very English Scandal‘s satirical bite. The Guardian hailed it “a furiously fast, fun ride that doesn’t let the deeper, darker issues fall from its grasp,” awarding four stars for its “female gaze on a male monopoly.” The Independent praised Coe’s “clever script” for teasing “subtexts about racism, sexism, and nuclear anxiety alongside the central theme of powerful men abusing their positions,” while Radio Times lauded the “stellar cast” for “beautifully capturing the main players.” Even skeptics conceded its strengths: The Telegraph noted the “non-linear plotting distracts” but conceded “the acting is of a high standard,” and Variety called it “an engaging—if somewhat redundant—lesson in history carried by the strength of its performers.” On Netflix, it’s already a binge behemoth: 25 million viewing hours in its first week, topping charts in the UK, US, and Australia, with #ProfumoAffair spiking 300% in searches. Fans rave on Reddit: “Darker than The Crown‘s scandals, smarter than Night Manager‘s suits—Norton’s Ward is the creepiest I’ve seen since Ledger’s Joker.”

Yet The Trial of Christine Keeler transcends tabloid titillation, emerging as a timeless treatise on truth’s treacherous toll. In an era of #MeToo reckonings and fake-news frenzies, Coe’s chronicle cuts to the quick: Ward’s suicide a stark indictment of institutional indifference, Keeler’s perjury charge a patriarchal payback for daring to defy the docket. It’s a haunting hymn to the women caught in the crossfire—Keeler and Mandy’s courtroom camaraderie a quiet rebellion against the gavel’s glower, their post-trial exile a sobering sequel to the spectacle. As the series fades on Keeler’s voiceover—”I still had a hell of a lot to learn”—it leaves us not with closure, but a challenge: in the game of thrones and trysts, who pays the piper when the powerful play the fool?

For those who’ve binged The Crown for its regal rot or The Night Manager for its suave subterfuge, The Trial of Christine Keeler is the next obsession: darker dives into deception, smarter sleights of history, ruthless reckonings with reality. Stream it now on Netflix, but beware—the truth it unearths isn’t buried treasure; it’s a ticking time bomb. In the end, as Ward whispers to his “little baby” amid the wreckage, “The game’s not over—it’s just getting interesting.” And for Britain—and the world that watched— it still is.