After its British premiere on ITV back in January—during which it amassed an average of 9.8m viewers across its four episodes in the UK, even beating the launch of Downton Abbey in 2010—the critically acclaimed drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office will be making its US TV debut tonight, April 7.
Led by BAFTA-winning actor Toby Jones, with Monica Dolan, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Alex Jennings, Ian Hart and Lia Williams rounding out the ensemble, the four-episode series details one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, where hundreds of postmasters were wrongly accused of theft, false accounting and fraud due to a faulty computer system named Horizon. In the shockingly true David and Goliath-esque story, a group of those UK postmasters formed the Justice For Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA) to expose the failures of Post Office. Jones portrays the group's founder, Alan Bates.
In an interview BAFTA, Jones discussed what it was like playing Bates in the drama series, which was written by Gwyneth Hughes and directed by James Strong: "Alan is quite an extraordinary man who presents as one of the most ordinary people you can meet. Indeed, that's true of a lot of the subpostmasters...He was quite clear that—although he was totally up for the drama because it drew attention to the struggle—he felt that he himself wasn't worthy of being heroic, because there was nothing unusual about him."
"I went to chat to other people who knew him, and they said Alan Bates is one of the smartest and most inspirational people they'd ever met," the actor added.
In terms of how to watch Mr Bates vs the Post Office in the United States, the show will make its premiere on PBS's drama anthology Masterpiece at 9pm Eastern tonight. Along with the TV broadcast, the series will be available to stream for free on PBS.org, the PBS MASTERPIECE Prime Video Channel, or the PBS App on devices such as Android, iOS, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast and Android TV.
Check out the trailer for Mr Bates vs The Post Office before you tune into the British series tonight on PBS.
