HOOK ALERT: Hostage on Netflix is the closest we’ll ever get to a true Bodyguard Season 2 😱💥 Packed with political chaos, explosive twists, and edge-of-your-seat tension, it’s the thriller fans have been begging for.
👉 Stream the drama everyone’s talking about now…
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The streamer’s action-packed political thriller stars Suranne Jones as the UK Prime Minister as she faces an unimaginable personal crisis. Meanwhile, a critical summit with Julie Delpy’s French president looms
The following article contains minor spoilers for Hostage.
Abigail Dalton (Suranne Jones) is barely a year into her tenure as the Prime Minister, and she is already beset by political crises. The worst of all of them? The NHS has been crippled by a drug shortage, the only remedy for which is to strike a crucial supply deal with the French. When Hostage begins, it is the eve of a critical summit with French president Vivienne Toussaint (Before‘s Julie Delpy), a once-popular centrist who has drifted to the right to court her country’s increasingly conservative electorate. It’s only seven weeks until Toussaint’s political fate will be tested by an election, so for her, the stakes are just as high. Of course, these are already the ingredients for any great political drama. And then comes the first of many, many big twists: Dalton’s husband Alex (Top Boy‘s Ashley Thomas aka Bashy), an aid worker for Médecins Sans Frontières, is kidnapped in French Guiana. Unlike your usual terrorists, they don’t want money. They wish for only one thing: for Dalton to resign from the office of Prime Minister by 1 p.m. the following day. And this is all within the first episode. It gets much, much crazier from there. There are shootouts; false rescue attempts; naturally, there is at least one mole within the French delegation who keeps Alex’s captors abreast of every move made by Dalton and Toussaint.
The result is a thrilling melodrama wherein personal horrors threaten political livelihoods, no one can be trusted, and the two leaders — despite their distinct world views, their domestic struggles, and their obligations to their families — must learn to work together, lest they are both ousted. Naturally, a show like this is mostly a vehicle for popcorn-friendly streaming entertainment; it’s all pretty schlocky and ridiculous, with explosive twists and plot beats that test our suspension of disbelief. (To be fair, given the bizarre state of our own political reality, writer Matt Charman has to push the drama to the max to keep our interest, as with anyone writing political fiction in 2025.) Nonetheless, Jones and Delpy both put in tremendous turns as powerful women on the brink, each faced with their own terrible choices. They’re easily the main draw. (With a shoutout for Conclave scene-stealer Lucian Msamati, who is tremendous as Kofi Adomako, Dalton’s beleaguered, constantly ignored advisor.)
If not one of Netflix’s many political thrillers to have come out in the last couple of years — namely The Diplomat, and indeed Charman’s last series for the streamer, Treason starring Charlie Cox — the most obvious point of comparison is Jed Mercurio’s Bodyguard. Though that was a little more grounded by comparison, Charman’s series is similarly rich with action, also brims with surprises, and is steeped with the sort of finger-gnawing tension that has you all but on your knees in front of the TV screen. (Notwithstanding the fact that it’s also British and centres on a woman in high office.) The result is five gripping episodes of TV that demand to be binged. The show does lose steam towards the end, but I got through every episode on a weekend afternoon. You probably will too.
