Everyone has their secrets. For most, it's a personal failing or foible they'd prefer to keep to themselves or, perhaps, something salacious about a friend. But some people hold secrets that are bigger, badder and with the potential to blow up everything they hold dear.
It's the skeleton's in these cupboards that the new psychological thriller, The Secrets She Keeps, dares to rattle. The show, based on the novel by crime writer Michael Robotham, follows two women with vastly different lives. There's Meghan, a glamorous Instagram Mummy blogger with the perfect family, children and life, and Agatha, a supermarket worker and soon-to-be solo mother. After a chance - or was it? - meeting, the pair bond over their pregnancies and so begins the entanglement of their lives.
"It's so interesting to make the threat something really feminine. You don't see that much," muses Laura Carmichael, who has swapped the elaborate and rich period costume of her Downton Abbey character, Lady Edith Crawley, for daggy hoodies and Agatha's unflattering checkout uniform.
"The drama comes out of Agatha's desire to be a mother and around Megan's need to be the perfect mother and the perfect wife and the struggles and pressures that puts on them," she explains. "That's the pressure of the story that leads to some very dark moments. It's not gun-toting crime drama, it's something that's very specifically female. I thought that was very interesting."
