SS-GB (TV series)

SS-GB is a 2017 British five-part drama produced for the BBC and based on the 1978 novel of the same name by Len Deighton. It is set in a 1941 alternative timeline in which the United Kingdom is occupied by Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

In the alternative world, it is November 1941, nine months after a successful German invasion of Britain. Winston Churchill has been executed, and King George VI is a prisoner who has not been seen in public for some time. His queen, Elizabeth, and their daughters Elizabeth and Margaret have escaped. A British government in exile, led by Rear-Admiral Conolly, exists but is not recognised by the United States. Nazi Germany has also maintained friendly relations with the Soviet Union, and Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov has just flown in to oversee the removal of the body of Karl Marx to the Soviet Union.

Douglas Archer, a Scotland Yard murder squad Detective Superintendent with a stellar reputation, is working under a German superior from the Schutzstaffel's (SS) Security Service, the security force of the Nazi Party. Though his wife was killed by a German bombing raid in the Blitz, Archer avoids involvement in political crimes and views resistance to the Nazis as futile. A routine murder investigation becomes political when it appears to have been perpetrated by agents of the British Resistance. An aggressive SS officer arrives and takes control of the investigation, which is of interest to the SS because the victim may have possessed data from the German Army's programme to produce an atomic bomb. Archer also learns that his secretary and lover, Sylvia Manning, is a member of the British Resistance, and he is reluctantly drawn into a conspiracy against the Germans.