What are they all hiding?

The hunt for a killer unearths a small town’s very dark secrets

Buell, Pennsylvania: the kind of American town that was once a thriving industrial powerhouse but has now been hollowed out by the globalised economy of the modern world.

The giant steel corporations mostly closed their gates many years ago, and what work there is in the local factory is hard to come by. Police chief Del Harris (Jeff Daniels) must do his best on a dwindling budget to keep law and order on the impoverished, sparsely populated streets.

But when a body turns up in an abandoned steel mill and Harris takes charge of the murder case, it turns everything in the town and his own personal life upside down.

The victim is a former police officer, and two young men are the suspects – one of whom just happens to be the son of Grace

Poe (Maura Tierney), the woman Harris has been dating for years. Now he must pursue the investigation wherever the truth might lie – but can his relationship survive whatever he uncovers in bringing the killer to justice?

Based on an acclaimed novel by Philipp Meyer published in 2009, this nine-part drama digs deep into the psyche of the US today.

Following in the footsteps of the BBC’s Happy Valley and Kate Winslet’s hit Stateside show Mare Of Easttown, American Rust is far more than just a routine police procedural, but instead uses the murder case as a starting point to peel back the layers of an entire community and find out what secrets lie hidden beneath.

At the heart of the drama, Daniels reveals to us in almost every scene – if you didn’t know it already – that he is one of the greatest screen actors of his generation. He’s previously shown a sublime talent for comedy in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose Of Cairo and Dumb And Dumber, and then, in recent years, has found a rich vein of brilliance in serious

dramatic roles, including the

9/11 docudrama The Looming Tower and The Comey Rule, the mini-series on the FBI investigation into Donald Trump.

Now he’s a flawed hero struggling to hold on to his sense of morality and tempted to do the wrong thing for the right reason and protect those he loves.

Who’d bet against Daniels picking up another Emmy to add to the two he already has?