| The Iris Affair | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Thriller |
| Created by | Neil Cross |
| Showrunner | Neil Cross |
| Written by |
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| Directed by |
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| Starring | |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 8 |
| Production | |
| Executive producers |
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| Producer | Tim Bricknell |
| Running time | 44–61 minutes |
| Production companies | |
| Original release | |
| Network | Sky Atlantic |
| Release | 16 October 2025 – present |
The Iris Affair is a British thriller television series created by Neil Cross for Sky Atlantic. The series stars Niamh Algar and Tom Hollander in the lead roles and premiered on 16 October 2025.
| No. | Title | Directed by | Written by | Original release date [1] | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Charlie Big Potatoes" | Terry McDonough | Neil Cross | 16 October 2025 | |
Private investor Cameron Beck tries to recruit genius puzzle solver Iris Nixon to re-activate Charlie, a secret and potentially world-changing sentient topological quantum device with two million Qubits of processing power. The activation sequence is in the encrypted diary of its disillusioned and now comatose creator Jensen Lind, which nobody else has been able to decipher. To fund Charlie’s creation, Beck borrowed several billion dollars from Intragroup, a dangerous organisation who will kill him if the device isn’t restored. Two years later, Iris is revealed to be living in Sardinia under various aliases, having stolen Jensen’s diary. She tutors wayward British teen Joy Baxter, introducing her to the mathematical concept of infinity. YouTuber Alfie Bird reports on a €4 million bounty, mainly bankrolled by Beck, to locate Iris. This attracts a corrupt group of Polizia di Stato officers, who succeed. Iris kills corrupt detective De Santis in self defence, and later flees his colleagues Baptiste and Krauss. The two are later seen assisting Beck in beating Teo Solinas, a local officer involved with Iris, and threatening Joy at gunpoint to get Iris to open a briefcase. | |||||
| 2 | "More Than Zero, Less Than One" | Terry McDonough | Neil Cross | 16 October 2025 | |
Iris uses their affair to blackmail Teo to sabotage the investigation into De Santis’ death and help her escape the island. However, Baptiste and Krauss involve themselves in the process and Nico Casterman, Teo’s superior, identifies Iris from an earlier encounter with Joy. A police manhunt is launched and Iris is detained and beaten by two local officers, but she deceives them into thinking it’s a case of mistaken identity, which stops them from arresting and taking her to Casterman. Krauss deduces Teo’s involvement with Iris, offering to help him recover his career if he gives her up. Beck wipes Iris’s bank accounts, and urges her to hand over the diary. She refuses, wanting to first know why Lind originally shut Charlie down and called it an abomination. After a police visit, Joy watches Bird’s YouTube videos about Iris’s true identity. Iris recruits Joy into retrieving a briefcase from her cottage and hiding it in a nearby tree, but it is quickly taken by Baptiste, who was covertly watching the property. | |||||
| 3 | "Joy Ride" | Terry McDonough | Neil Cross and Susan E. Connolly | 16 October 2025 | |
18 months prior, Iris assists Beck with the decryption. She cracks the password (coordinates for the Boötes Void), but when Charlie re-activates Lind goes on a rampage and kills five scientists. Before being captured, he warns her the device cannot be awoken. Realising something is wrong with Charlie, Iris flees the facility with Lind’s diary after reinstating the encryption and deleting her work, which resets the password to a new cipher in the diary. In the present, Iris calls Bird, offering to tell him the full story if he helps her against Beck, and sends him footage of her examining Charlie. She tells him to meet her in Rome the following day. Baptiste takes Joy prisoner. Working with Krauss, Teo meets with Iris and delivers her to the detectives, having lied that he would take her by ferry to the mainland. Discovering the briefcase containing the diary will release hydrochloric acid if the wrong combination is entered, Beck has Krauss beat Teo to death with a telescopic baton and Baptiste threaten Joy at gunpoint for the true code. Iris finally gives a code that opens the case, but sets off an explosion that kills the two detectives. Beck departs via helicopter with Joy hostage, knowing Iris still has the diary. Iris flees in the detectives car, narrowly avoiding Casterman. | |||||
| 4 | "Collider" | Terry McDonough | Neil Cross and Susan E. Connolly | 16 October 2025 | |
Lind says it was his obligation to kill the other scientists to stop Charlie being re-activated. 18 months later, Beck returns with Joy to the facility housing Charlie in Slovenia. He is called by Hugo Pym, acting head of Intragroup, who threatens him due to the delay. A disgusted Beck rejects Pym’s suggestion they amputate parts of Joy to coax Iris out of hiding. Casterman locks down Sardinia after finding Teo, Krauss and Baptiste’s bodies, but Iris escapes in a stolen boat to Talamone. She deduces Lind used his own DNA sequence as a book cipher to encrypt the password. Enrico Bruni, the leader of the corrupt detectives, puts pressure on Casterman to find Iris after learning of his men's deaths. Iris tells Beck she will swap Joy for the diary. Beck grants Joy limited access to Spotify, which Iris uses to send a coded message, asking her to obtain Lind’s DNA before the exchange. Iris travels to Rome and robs a drug dealer, Freddo, for cash before meeting with Bird. After seeing Iris in the news and becoming aware of the bounty, Freddo has his couriers search the city for her. She asks Bird to retrieve the diary, hidden in the Gregorian library, in exchange for her story. However, Bird is confronted by Casterman (who called him for information about Iris the day before) as he exits. | |||||
| 5 | "Ex Nihilo" | Sarah O'Gorman | Susan E. Connolly | 23 October 2025 | |
Bird is revealed to have started his YouTube channel about the hunt for Iris after being accused of plagiarism as a journalist. Bruni and his detectives obtain Iris and Bird’s location from Freddo and threaten him to back off. Casterman tells Bird she suspects Iris of killing multiple police officers. Iris intercepts them, retrieves the diary and incapacitates Casterman with fentanyl, but later revives her with Narcan upon realising Bruni’s men are raiding the apartment building. She professes her innocence to Casterman, returning her sidearm and asking for help escaping in exchange for the truth about Teo’s death. Beck introduces Joy to Charlie and describes its potential if re-activated, including curing cancer, dementia and reversing climate change. Meski, Beck’s head of security, becomes suspicious of Joy and allows her into Lind’s quarters to uncover her motives. Joy takes hair from Lind’s hairbrush, and then encounters him. Lind discusses his beliefs that rules of physics are symmetric and reversible and that "all time is one", referencing Einstein and T.S. Eliot, and that he thinks Charlie invented itself, coming to him as a “memory of the future”. Deducing she is working for Iris, he warns Joy before she is removed that Charlie should never be awoken. Pym arrives at the facility. | |||||
| 6 | "The Oblivion Suite" | Sarah O'Gorman | Ian Scott McCullough | 30 October 2025 | |
Pym asks Lind to re-activate Charlie for a brief period to deduce a cure for his superior's granddaughters FFT, but he refuses. Casterman hides Iris in the apartments crawlspace, telling Bruni’s group she escaped. Bruni enlists her to watch over Bird whilst they continue the search, but conspires with his colleagues to kill them both once Iris is captured. Beck meets with Iris in Tivoli to exchange Joy for the diary. She refuses to give him the diary, and shows a video call of Casterman threatening to destroy it with a blowtorch if Joy isn’t released. Beck releases Joy, but Meski follows them with a drone. Bird deploys his own drone as a countermeasure, distracting Meski long enough for the group to lose her. Bird records an interview with Iris. She reveals the diary contains encrypted records of discoveries Charlie made, marvels such as organ culture, nuclear fusion and superconductors but also profoundly evil weapons like genetically targeted viruses. However, what scares her the most is that the device appears to have calculated how to bring about the end times. She needs to decrypt the final pages to be certain, and tells Bird if it is not a delusion she intends to destroy both Charlie and Lind. That evening, Iris bluntly tells Joy she saved her partly to further her own goals. Growing disillusioned with Iris’s views, Joy steals the diary and returns it to Beck. | |||||
| 7 | "Two Seconds to Midnight" | Sarah O'Gorman | Neil Cross | 6 November 2025 | |
Intragroup brings in a new team to decode Charlie’s activation sequence from the diary. Lind warns Pym he is trying to protect everyone by preventing it from awakening. Pym responds by torturing him. Beck, Joy and Meski return to the facility and are detained, with Pym beating Beck for the inconvenience he has caused. Iris convinces Alfie to report the whole story. She calls Beck, urging him to destroy Charlie or she will take him down, showing indifference to the lethal consequences it would have for Bird and Casterman. Casterman restrains her upon overhearing this. Bruni’s team discover from CCTV that Casterman is working with Iris, and use Bird’s crashed drone to pinpoint their location. During a gunfight, Bird is killed whilst livestreaming. Iris overpowers and kills Bruni, but is captured by his team, who vote to kill her to avenge their boss instead of exchanging her for the ransom. She is rescued by Casterman, who guns down the remaining detectives with a Beretta AR70/90 acquired during the attack. Iris urges Casterman to take Bird’s evidence to Interpol in exchange for protection, and departs for the facility in Slovenia. Pym stares in awe as Charlie is finally reactivated. | |||||
| 8 | "Charlie Says" | Sarah O'Gorman | Neil Cross | 13 November 2025 | |
Six years earlier, Beck tells Lind of the personal reasons he wants to fund something as potentially universe-altering as Charlie. The FFT cure proves difficult to extract from Charlie, who also starts observing everyone. Lind tells Pym the device will only give it to him once it is set free. Iris constructs a small bomb and swallows it in a condom before arriving at the facility. Lind says he believes the instructions for Charlie were encoded in the fabric of spacetime by an advanced civilisation in a dying alternate universe, and its ultimate purpose is to bring that civilisation into ours, resulting in humanity’s annihilation. To effect this, if set free it will start by spreading new technologies and providing what humans need to foster dependence, ultimately enslaving them to further its aims. Pym offers Iris a new life and money if she can extract the data needed. She proposes re-setting Charlie, which would destroy its current consciousness. Pym relieves Meski and her security team, but she secretly returns to the facility to extract Beck and Joy, killing most of Pym’s guards. Beck stays to stop Iris destroying Charlie. Believing Iris wants her dead to tie up loose ends, an increasingly disillusioned Joy takes a dead guards pistol and confronts Iris in Charlie’s chamber. Beck kills Pym when he threatens Joy, and finally realises the danger posed by the manipulative device. Charlie flashes a light, causing Joy to jump and accidentally shoot Beck, killing him. Iris uses the bomb to help Joy and Lind escape, and seemingly destroys Charlie's physical structure with a fire axe. However, Charlie is revealed to have somehow escaped into the internet, using a deepfake of Bird to begin spreading its scientific breakthroughs to start humanity's dependence on it. | |||||
Written by Neil Cross, Susan E. Connolly, and Ian Scott McCullough, Terry McDonough is the series' lead director and is also an executive producer. [2] Sarah O'Gorman is also directing episodes. The series producer is Tim Bricknell. Executive producers are Cross, McDonough; Dante Di Loreto and Jenni Sherwood for Fremantle, and Adrian Sturges for Sky Studios. [3]
The cast is led by Niamh Algar and Tom Hollander, and also includes Sacha Dhawan, Peter Sullivan, Maya Sansa, Meréana Tomlinson, and Debi Mazar [4] as well as Kristofer Hivju, Harry Lloyd, and Lorenzo De Moor. [5] [6]
Filming took place in Cagliari and Alghero on Sardinia in the summer of 2024. [7] [8] First-look images from filming were released in May 2025, with the confirmed title The Iris Affair. [9]
The title song, “Here Comes That Day” by Siouxsie Sioux was described by Gerard Gilbert in a review of the series in The i Paper as a "brassy Shirley Bassey-style blast" evoking James Bond movie soundtracks. [10]
The eight-episode series premiered on 16 October 2025 on Sky Atlantic in the United Kingdom and Ireland. [11] [12] [6] The first four episodes were also released on the streaming service Now the same day. [1] Sky Group will also release the series in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Italy. Fremantle is handling worldwide distribution of the series.
The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 100% approval rating based on 5 critic reviews. [13]