_The Edge of Darkness_ is a brooding show about a murky world. It sees the lives, economics, and politics of rural Yorkshire through a smudged, green-tinged lens. It hears buzzing florescent lights, groaning air conditioners, tea kettles boiling in empty homes, and silence. Sometimes, it lets us listen to a baleful electric guitar moan and wail.

Ronnie Craven works in that murky world. He sees corruption. He listens as the authorities discourage him from investigating a mining union's odd elections results. He hears his boss tell him that it would be best if he let his colleagues look into his daughter's murder. He suspects they have a point, but he won't pay it any heed. He's haunted by his own corruption, and he thinks that's what caused his daughter's death.

But Craven wants to find out for sure. He's going to see just how deep the corruption runs. He will find out why his daughter's possessions are seeped in radiation, why two intelligence agents think she was a terrorist, why her boyfriend would betray his political allies just so he can keep pecking away at the people he betrays them to, why the local water table makes Geiger counters nervous, and why a multi-national mining corporation, and it's government allies, don't want him to ask what they're doing with refined plutonium.

Craven will not, however, ask why water seeps from the spot on his lawn where his daughter was shot. And he's too lonely and miserable to question why he hears, and sometimes sees, his dead daughter speak to him.

The Edge of Darkness is a show that inhabits a world one step removed from our own. But it's a small step, and Bob Peck's crestfallen portrayal of Craven never allows us to doubt his reality. Joe Don Baker's morbidly humorous depiction of Craven's CIA ally both adds to the slightly surreal atmosphere of the story and grounds it in human eccentricity. And the rest of the cast aptly handles the compromised, callous, and, sometimes, guilt-ridden characters that politics, and conspiracy stories, require.