Eternal Law: new series from ITV

Brand new wintertime series from ITV, complete with an angelic twist!

Set in the beautiful city of York, Eternal Law is a warm and witty new series, written and created by Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham (Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes).

The series tells the story of two central characters, Zak and Tom, who are lawyers with an intriguing secret – they are angels placed on earth to do good. We didn’t see that one coming!

In a nutshell, Zak is the more mysterious of the two characters. He is an intelligent yet cynical angel sent to earth to help a community.  Zak’s angel credentials are hidden from public view and only very occasionally in moments of privacy do we glimpse a dramatic flutter of wings that will confirm Zak is on earth to help, influence and understand humans as they go about their day to day lives.

Tom, on the other hand is the more happy-go-lucky of the two. Tom is an eager newcomer who is on earth for the first time.  His naivety gets him into scrapes and is a great source of humour to all around him.  Briefed strictly not to become emotionally involved with humans, but to guide, advise, and comfort, Zak and Tom are both lawyers working for a local legal firm who deal with gritty, real-life situations as they attempt to prompt humans to understand the consequences of their actions.  

Lawyers and angels may sound like an unlikely combination, but Samuel West, who plays Zak assures us that the pairing is a match made, quite literally, in heaven:

Angels who are also lawyers, it sounds like two different series crashing head on, but it doesn’t feel like that.  If you say that there are angels on earth and they all do lots of other jobs – there are angel taxi drivers, angel lawyers and angel doctors – then it makes more sense. 

I think the structure works in two ways, it allows you to say very interesting things about another species, a species that is sort of human but not quite, but most importantly it allows you say important things about humanity and to have big arguments about things that matter, like love and hate, death and war, and right and wrong. Whether you believe angels exist and they’re keeping an eye on you, or whether you think they’ve been invented to remind us of the best things of ourselves, there is a reason why they run through the literature for hundreds, in fact thousands of years.  It’s pretty exciting I think. 

Eternal Law will air on ITV later this winter.

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