Nobody warns you what The Day of the Jackal actually is before you press play. The marketing sells a sleek European assassin thriller. What you get is closer to a ten-hour police procedural with a very expensive sniper rifle bolted on. Both of those things can be good. They are not the same thing, and knowing which one you’re signing up for is the whole game.

So here’s the manual.

What it is

This is Sky and Peacock’s 2024 reboot of Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 novel — the same source as the 1973 film, but reimagined for a contemporary world of crypto-money, surveillance, and tech moguls. Eddie Redmayne plays the Jackal, a freelance hitman who works only at the very top end of the market. Lashana Lynch plays Bianca Pullman, the British intelligence officer who decides, more or less on instinct, that the impossible long-distance kill in episode one was the work of one specific ghost.

Ten episodes. Roughly 100 million pounds on screen. Created by Ronan Bennett. Forsyth himself signed on as a consulting producer before his death in 2025, which gives the thing a strange continuity with the original — the man who invented this assassin watched someone else reinvent him.

It became the biggest Sky Original launch ever and the most-watched original series on both Sky and Peacock. That’s not a fluke. It’s also not the same as being the best thing you’ll watch this year.

The thing the trailer hides

The premise that makes this version tick — and the one the marketing buries — is that the Jackal has a family. A wife, a kid, a quiet house in Spain. The whole season is built on the tension between the man who is the most lethal contractor alive and the man pretending to be a normal husband who travels too much for work.

This is the show’s best idea and its biggest risk. When it works, it’s genuinely tense: every domestic scene is a fuse burning. When it doesn’t, you start asking how a man this paranoid built a life this exposed, and the spell breaks.

Decide up front whether you’re here for the tradecraft or the marriage. The show wants you to care about both. You will probably care about one.

Redmayne carries it. Full stop.

Redmayne is the reason to watch. He plays the Jackal as a man who is only ever fully present when he’s working — methodical, patient, slightly inhuman in the way the best fictional professionals are. The disguise work, the prep, the long silent stretches of building a hide and waiting: that’s where the show is at its absolute best, and it’s almost entirely on him.

Lynch’s Bianca is more divisive, and you should know that going in so you’re not blindsided. A lot of viewers find the character written as relentlessly right-about-everything in a way that strains belief — the brilliant-but-abrasive detective archetype turned up past where the writing can support it. Your mileage will vary. Mine: the performance is fine, the writing of the role is the weak link, and the show occasionally mistakes unlikeable for complex.

Where it sags

Honest tradeoffs, because that’s the point of this blog:

The pacing is uneven. Ten episodes is at least one too many, and the middle stretch leans on coincidence and contrivance to keep the cat and mouse in the same maze. There are plot inconsistencies sharp-eyed viewers will catch and never fully un-catch. And the elite-operative-makes-one-sloppy-human-mistake engine that drives the back half asks you to accept that the most careful man alive gets careless exactly when the script needs him to.

None of this is fatal. It’s the difference between a great thriller and a very watchable one.

How to actually watch it

• Don’t binge it in one sitting. It’s built in two-and-three-episode arcs. Treat it like a limited series with chapters, not a movie that forgot to end.
• Lower the spy-thriller expectation, raise the character-study one. Go in expecting Bourne and you’ll be annoyed. Go in expecting a procedural about two obsessives circling each other and you’ll be rewarded.
• Stay for the finale. It deliberately leaves a loose end — and given the Jackal’s stated allergy to loose ends, that ending is the entire pitch for what comes next.

The season 2 question

It’s already renewed and shooting, largely around Budapest. The setup is clean: the Jackal was double-crossed by the people who hired him, never got paid the nine figures he was promised, and watched his cover life come apart. Season two is the revenge tour.

One thing to flag, because it matters: Bennett stepped back as head writer after season one (he stays on as an executive producer), and David Harrower took over the room. New blood in the writers’ room of a show whose biggest weakness was its writing is either the best news or a coin flip. We’ll find out.

The verdict

Worth your time, with the right expectations loaded first. The Day of the Jackal is a gorgeous, grown-up, slightly overlong character piece anchored by a genuinely great central performance and a premise sharp enough to forgive the contrivances. Watch it for Redmayne building a rifle in silence. Stay for the marriage that can’t possibly survive the job.

Just don’t go in expecting the trailer’s show. That’s the manual nobody handed you.