I, Jack Wright is a worthy successor to Unforgotten (2025)

It must be very rewarding to have created a hit TV show, but also potentially constraining. Writer Chris Lang – creator of ITV’s cold-case crime drama Unforgotten, now in its sixth series – must have fancied a change from dreaming up backstories for decomposed corpses. Certainly, his new whodunit I, Jack Wright, feels like it’s been written by an author unshackled from a winning but repetitive formula. It’s great fun and – ironically for a murder story – full of life.

The plot could be described as Agatha Christie meets Succession. It centres around the disputed will of a gruff Lancastrian tycoon, the titular Jack Wright, who has seemingly killed himself. He is played by Trevor Eve, an inevitably brief appearance unless we are later to be subjected to protracted flashbacks, though I hope not. While Jack’s widowed third wife, Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is shocked to discover that her late husband has secretly changed his will, the police realise that Jack has actually been bumped off.

The deceased moneybags has also instructed that his revised will be read in front of the assembled beneficiaries – making for a suitably dramatic scene that concludes this opening episode and neatly sets up the rest of the series.

Around the table are his two very different sons, John (Daniel Rigby), who has diligently worked in the family’s brick-making firm for 25 years and now expects to inherit the boss’s chair, and Graham (John Simm), a lairy, substance-abusing record producer who owes money to dangerous people.

Fans of ITV1’s Sunday night crime drama Grace may be surprised to not only find Simm in the cast, but also Zoe Tapper, who plays the eponymous copper’s girlfriend Cleo in that series. Their characters here couldn’t be more different, however. Simm seems to be enjoying himself immensely as a swaggering Mancunian geezer – a million Liam Gallagher-tinged miles from the mournful Roy Grace – while Tapper, as John’s wife Georgia, is a grasping schemer in the Lady Macbeth mould.

They are not the only big names in a cast studded with well-known faces. Gemma Jones plays Jack’s first wife Rose, James Fleet is Rose’s partner Bobby, and Niamh Cusack plays Jack’s loyal secretary Annie. Harry Lloyd meanwhile makes an appealingly foxy police detective, the softly-spoken but crafty DCI Hector Morgan. He even gets his own Columbo moment, asking “just one more thing…” having turned to leave a suspect.

The other beneficiaries of Jack’s will – and therefore by default murder suspects – are his only grandchild, Emily (Ruby Ashbourne-Serkis), his estate manager Derek, his eldest daughter Asher (who has been missing for the past two years; we can expect her to turn up later) and, of course, Sally. Nikki Amuka-Bird (Luther, Avenue 5) is perhaps second only to Nicola Walker at expressing deep emotions and she makes a convincingly grief-stricken widow. It emerges however that Sally has secrets of her own.

If the idea of a toxic patriarch playing off his children and colleagues over an inheritance sounds straight out of Succession, then the comparison fades somewhat after the contents of the will are revealed. The big losers are Jack’s sons Graham and John, and John’s ambitious wife Georgia, while granddaughter Emily inherits Jack’s company shares and £15m. Annie and Derek don’t do too badly either, receiving a million apiece, while Sally is only left with a limited rent-free tenancy.

Future episodes follow both the police investigation and the legal wranglings as intergenerational secrets are laid bare. Lang has apparently already planned two further series of I, Jack Wright, which are just waiting for the green light from UKTV. On this evidence, I’d advise them not to hesitate.

‘I, Jack Wright’ continues next Wednesday at 9pm on U&Alibi