Series has Brits a-twitter

If you don’t watch much TV drama and you want to see why so many people say TV is so much more adult than the movies right now, you owe it to yourself to see the first few minutes of Broad

church, a critically acclaimed eight-part drama from the U.K. that makes its North American debut this weekend. There are moments that are sublime.

Broadchurch is already one of the most-watched, most-tweeted-about dramas in U.K. television history.

It’s a slow-burning, eerily compelling character study of a small, seaside town in Dorset dealing with fallout from the murder of an 11-year-old boy. When more than eight million U.K. viewers tuned in to

Broadchurch’s finale in April, the show briefly supplanted Downton Abbey as the most closely analyzed and debated drama.

The setup is familiar, but don’t think you’ve seen it done quite this way before. A boy is found dead one morning on a beach below towering white cliffs, in a small town where everyone knows everyone else, everyone has grown up together and there are seemingly no secrets.

A local detective, Ellie Miller, played by two-time BAFTA winner Olivia Colman, has been passed over for promotion by a rank outsider, Det. Inspector Alec Hardy, played with hollow-eyed world-weariness by David Tennant. Miller has known the dead boy all his life; her son went to school with him and she’s heartbroken for the grieving family and livid that the case has been kicked to someone who doesn’t know Dorset from Dover.

D.I. Hardy, for his part, is recovering from a case he mishandled while he was a rising star with the Metropolitan Police Authority; he put in a transfer to the countryside so he could get a fresh start, and he’s appalled by what he sees as a lack of professionalism.

There’s a grace and dig- nity to almost everything about Broadchurch, despite its dark underpinnings and unspeakably sad premise.

Broadchurch is one of those rare dramas, on film or in TV, that appreciates the value of long silences and still-life portraits. The community is close-knit and crime is virtually unknown, which raises the dramatic stakes. Silence can be both beautiful and terrible.

Simply put, Broadchurch is once of the most alluring, compulsively addictive dramas you will see this year, another example of how the world’s best television drama is being made around the world, and not just within the orbit of the Hollywood studios.

A programming note: Showcase has chosen to show Broadchurch’s eight hours over four weeks, on Sundays and Mondays, with the finale airing on Aug. 26. You’ll want to keep that in mind because this is one serialized story of which you don’t want to miss even an hour. It’s that good.

10 p.m., Showcase, Sunday and Monday