Rob Williams is good at writing people whose suffering does not make them right. We recommend The Victim for its attention to grief, though his plotting can press too hard and his questions become too plainly signposted.
Fi1m perspective
In The Victim (2019), people in pain have reasons to believe things about themselves that we need not accept. At his best, Rob Williams makes their grief matter without letting it explain everything they do. We were unsettled by the way suffering could make someone's certainty persuasive before we had decided whether to trust it. Kelly Macdonald and John Hannah keep the people convincing when the mystery begins to feel overworked. It is an absorbing legal thriller, and a good reason to take Williams seriously.
His first original series, Chasing Shadows (2014), centred on a missing persons unit. He then contributed to the writers' room for the first two seasons of The Man in the High Castle (2015), and wrote an episode of Killing Eve (2018). On the latter, created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer make the obsessive central relationship persuasive. We would be cautious about treating that achievement as evidence of Williams's particular gifts. The Victim, which he created and wrote, gives us a clearer view of his choices.
In The Victim, the trial and flashbacks give Williams a useful way of testing a judgement against information that arrives later. The four episodes have enough emotional weight to sustain the mystery. The trouble comes when he keeps pointing out how difficult our judgements ought to be. We can start to hear a writer arranging a discussion, and the effort to keep questions open makes the plotting insistent. Macdonald and Hannah are important here: the performances preserve the awkwardness that the writing sometimes risks tidying away.
His later work as a creator includes Screw (2022), told primarily from the prison officers' perspective, and Suspicion (2022), an adaptation of the Israeli series False Flag. Williams was showrunner on both. Some reviews of Suspicion complained of sluggish pacing and sermonising, which suggests the need for firmer restraint than his writing always exercises. We want the uncertainty to come from what characters do, without repeated reminders that the situation is complicated. Try The Victim first; Macdonald is worth staying with when the plotting starts to insist.
Biography
Rob Williams is a British screenwriter and television producer. Before entering television, he worked in publishing as Creative Director at Penguin Books. In 2008 he was selected for the BBC Writers' Academy and subsequently wrote episodes for the BBC continuing dramas Doctors, EastEnders, Casualty and Holby City, as well as DCI Banks.
Williams created and wrote the ITV thriller Chasing Shadows (2014) and the BBC One miniseries The Victim (2019). He contributed to the first season of Killing Eve (2018) and wrote five episodes of The Man in the High Castle (2015–2016). Later credits include creating Screw (2022) for Channel 4 and Suspicion (2022) for Apple TV+, and creating and writing the 2026 Netflix miniseries The Witness. He has received BAFTA nominations for his work.
