The gripping new BBC dramas you need to watch this autumn featuring Line of Duty and Ugly Betty stars

TV FANS can get excited to curl up with some gripping new BBC dramas this autumn.

With a host of new dramas to look forward to, as well as the return of fan favourites, there is something for everyone.

ITV has already released a guide to the dramas it has coming up over the next few months, but the BBC can certainly give its rival a run for its money.

Moonflower Murders

The Crown’s Lesley Manville and Tim McMullan return in Moonflower Murders, the sequel to Magpie Murders, as editor turned amateur sleuth Susan Ryeland and world-famous fictional detective Atticus Pünd.

Susan has left publishing and is living in Crete with her long-time boyfriend, Andreas. But her idyll is disturbed by the shadow of a murder committed at a British country hotel eight years ago.

Alan Conway visited the hotel and wrote a novel based on what happened there.

Cecily Treherne, the young woman who helps run the hotel, read the book and believed the wrong man had been arrested.

Now she has disappeared. Can Susan uncover the secret hidden in the book and find Cecily before it is too late?

The Listeners

The new drama The Listeners – starring Rebecca Hall – centres around a popular English teacher, who begins to hear a low humming sound that no one else around her can hear.

This seemingly innocuous noise gradually upsets the balance of her life, increasing tension between herself and her husband, Paul, and daughter, Ashley.

But despite multiple doctors, no obvious source or medical cause can be found.

When she discovers that a student of hers, Kyle (Ollie West – Hamnet), can also hear the sound, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship.

Finding themselves isolated from their families, friends and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of neighbours.

The group is led by a charismatic couple, Jo and Omar, who also claim they can hear The Hum – and who believe it could be a gift, heard only by a “chosen few.”

The Listeners explores the seduction of the wild and unknowable, the human search for the transcendent and the rise of conspiracy culture in the West.

Return to Paradise

Return to Paradise is a new Australia-set spin-off from one of the UK’s most watched dramas, Death in Paradise.

The new addition heads Down Under to Australia and picks up the baton from Beyond Paradise, which became the franchise’s first spin off in 2023.

Set in the idyllic, beachside hamlet of Dolphin Cove, Return to Paradise is six gripping and fiendishly clever murder mysteries – all against the spectacular backdrop of the Australian coastal landscape.

Australian ex-pat Mackenzie Clarke is the seemingly golden girl of the London Metropolitan police force has built a reputation for being able to crack the most impossible of cases.

However, she’s suddenly forced to up sticks and move back to her childhood home of Dolphin Cove, a beautiful, coastal paradise and Mackenzie’s worst nightmare.

Having escaped her hometown at the earliest opportunity six years ago, Mack vowed she’d never come back, leaving a lot of unfinished business and unanswered questions.

On her return she’s still no fan of the town, and the people of Dolphin Cove are certainly no fans of hers. In fact everyone would prefer her not to be there, including Mackenzie herself.

But when a murder takes place in Dolphin Cove, Mack can’t help but put her inspired detective brilliance to good use and determines, despite her reservations, that she needs to make the best of it.

Plus she must tie up the loose ends with the man she left at the altar six years ago.

Shetland

Shetland is a Scottish detective television series filmed mainly on the isle of Shetland. The long-running drama delves into the dark side of one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Series nine sees Ashley Jensen and Alison O’Donnell reprise their roles as Detectives Ruth Calder and Alison ‘Tosh’ McIntosh.

A double missing person’s case blurs the lines between the personal and the professional, as Calder and Tosh are drawn into a missing persons investigation.

When Tosh’s friend, Annie Bett, goes missing she suspects something is seriously wrong. Ruth Calder has no time to recover from a life-threatening ordeal of her own, as together they set out in search of Annie and her young son, Noah.

They discover accountant Annie is estranged from her husband, Ian, and has been staying with mussel farmer John Harris and his two sons, Patrick and Fergus. Worryingly, there’s no sign of Annie there either.

Calder follows Tosh’s instincts and looks for Annie at the home she shared with Ian. There, they discover Professor Euan Rossi who claims to have been Annie’s Oxford University tutor many years ago.

Suspicions are stirred when Tosh and Calder learn Rossi travelled all the way to Shetland after Annie left him a distressed voicemail the night she vanished.

Meanwhile, at the station, Calder delves deeper into another case involving a deadly argument between two brothers.

When a bloodied person turns up at a remote garage, nothing can prepare the team for what lies ahead.

Shetland series nine begins on Wednesday, November 6 at 9pm on BBC One. The other dramas launch dates will be confirmed in due course.