VisionTV viewers know that there’s nothing like the comfort of getting immersed into a well-crafted mystery. For all you mystery fanatics, we’ve got another fantastic crime drama to sink your teeth into. Enjoy the early seasons of the multi-award winning BBC series Silent Witness now airing Tuesdays at 9pm ET.

A compelling and thought-provoking thriller, Silent Witness is a unique blend of crime, mystery, science, and detection. The series follows a dedicated team of forensic pathologists as they use their scientific expertise to unravel clues in mysterious deaths. Everybody tells a story: who they were, how they lived and, most importantly, how they died. With consistently engaging and imaginative writing, Silent Witness is one of BBC’s most successful and longest-running dramas, first airing in the mid-’90s.

Unlike many other crime dramas, Silent Witness highlights the scientific elements of investigation rather than the police work, which offers a unique perspective on cases we typically only see through the eyes of detectives. There’s also a heavy focus on the victims’ stories as the pathologists are tasked with unraveling the mystery through the evidence they collect from the deceased’s body.

The first 3 seasons, which are currently airing on VisionTV, are set in the university town of Cambridge and mainly follow the activities of pathologist Sam Ryan, played by Amanda Burton. Professor Ryan has an all-embracing, passionate notion of justice which often does not mesh well with her police colleagues’ objective of getting a conviction. This leads Sam into trouble both in her personal and professional lives but, to Sam, each dead body deserves nothing but the truth.

When the series first premiered in 1996, the character of Sam Ryan was one of the few portrayals of a strong, capable, professional woman working in a male-dominated field. One of the other rare examples of this type of character is Helen Mirren’s DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect, which currently airs on our sister station ONETV.

In 2022, Silent Witness celebrated a landmark 25 seasons on BBC. After leaving the series in 2004 during Season 8, Amanda Burton, who has won 3 National Television Awards in the UK for her role as Sam Ryan, returned to the show to mark this very special occasion. 

“Thinking back over that time was quite an emotional thing for me,” Burton told RadioTimes. “Silent Witness was a huge jump for me. It was my first big lead, and was a show built around my character.”

“I’ve always felt emotional about Sam, because she’s such a strong character, a lone wolf. She made a strong impact in those days. There was a point when I was pressurised to make her more fluffy and likeable, but I shot that down quite quickly. She was not an archetypal female character, and I believe she was a forerunner for strong women in drama.”

You can watch how the great Sam Ryan got her start in the early seasons of Silent Witness airing Tuesdays at 9pm ET on VisionTV through October 16.