IT’S been 11 years since Gillian Anderson last played FBI agent Dana Scully in The X Files on the small screen, and five since the last film.

She’s appeared in heaps of different projects since then, including Oscar-winning film The Last King of Scotland, Donmar Warehouse’s acclaimed production of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and the BBC adaptations of Dickens’s Bleak House and Great Expectations.

Despite all this excellent work, she has not managed to shake off Scully – but that could all be changed by her appearance in The Fall.

The five-part crime drama from writer Allan Cubitt is, says Ben Stephenson, controller of BBC Drama Commissioning, “a unique, forensic and characterful take on a classic genre that continues BBC2’s commitment to original British drama. Cubitt’s rich and complex psychological thriller combined with another compelling performance from Anderson will keep viewers on the edge of their seats.”

She plays DCI Gibson, a talented Met detective who arrives in Belfast to conduct a 28-day review at a police station whose staff are getting nowhere in their hunt for a killer. It may sound like a routine entry in the genre, but the twist is that it reveals the murderer’s identity to the audience early on. In The Fall’s case it’s handsome family man Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan), arguably the last person you would expect to be a ruthless killer. At home, he’s a dedicated husband with a wife who adores him and two cute-as-buttons children.

But for the rest of the time, he’s a disturbed soul who allows his dark side to take over rather too often. He’s killed before, and Gibson realises that similarities in various unsolved cases point to the fact that a serial killer is on the loose.

She also knows the villain has a taste for it. The problem is, her new colleagues are reluctant to believe that several deaths on their patch have been carried out by one man. Meanwhile, Spector already has his eye on his next victim, young solicitor Sarah Kay (Laura Donnelly), with whom he’s become obsessed.