Toxic Town is a four-part series that has just landed on Netflix boasting an all-star cast including Doctor Who favourite Jodie Whittaker.
The limited series is set to bring the story of one of the UK's biggest environmental scandals to life as three mothers Susan, Tracey and Maggie battle to prove birth defects in local babies born in the 1990s are down to toxic waste spillages in the Northamptonshire town of Corby.
There are six main stars in Toxic Town, including former Doctor Who star Jodie Whittaker as tough-yet-fragile Susan McIntyre, who’s left blaming herself when her son, Connor, is born with no fingers on his left hand.
Meanwhile, Claudia Jessie (Bridgerton) plays Maggie whose son Samuel is born with a deformed foot - however, her husband, who works as a driver for the council contractor, fears for his job if Maggie joins the women’s fight for the truth.
Also starring is Sex Education season 4 and The White Lotus season 3 star Aimee Lou Wood plays Tracey Taylor, who, along with her husband is left reeling when their newborn daughter Shelby dies following a number of developmental defects. After bumping into Susan, the two team up to take on the council.
Bank of Dave's Rory Kinnear stars in the series as Des Collins, the lawyer they hire, while Downton Abbey's Brendan Coyle and The Full Monty star Robert Carlyle are Corby borough councilors.
But if that wasn't enough of an all-star cast, the show also boasts Stephen McMillan (Boiling Point), Lauren Lyle (Outlander), Joe Dempsie (Game of Thrones), Michael Socha (Showtrial season 2, This Is England), Matthew Durkan (Wedding Season), Karla Crome (Carnival Row).
The series, which sees the small English former steel town of Corby thrown into the limelight, is written by Jack Thorne (The Swimmers, His Dark Materials) - and you can be forgiven for not knowing about the real-life story from the 1980s as Thorne also hadn't before he started writing...
“I didn’t know the story,” Thorne told Tudum. “I’d never heard of the people involved, and I’d never heard of the case, but the more you look into it, the more complicated it all becomes. I’ve done legal dramas before, but this one … being taken through the actual truth of it and seeing the journey that they had to go on in order to prove this, I found very surprising and shocking."
All four episodes of Toxic Town are available to stream on Netflix now.
