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HBO Max continues stealth drops of some of the best drama mini-series on television. Last year highlights included “The Head” and “ Station Eleven ,” and they start 2022 strongly with the fantastic “The Tourist,” a twisty tale that plays like an Aussie version of “ Fargo .” With sharp dialogue, clever plotting, and career-best work from Jamie Dornan and Danielle Macdonald , this is a great little thriller, a show that constantly keeps you guessing and entertained in equal measure.

The “ Belfast ” and “ Fifty Shades of Grey ” star plays an unnamed man (at least for a while) who is driving through the very remote Australian outback. He stops at a station to use the bathroom, banters with the guy behind the counter, and hits the road again. Looking in the rearview mirror, he sees a truck gaining on him with remarkable speed. The Man twists off the road to avoid it and the trucker follows, revealing through a POV from his cab that this is very intentional—he’s trying to kill this tourist. They race through the desert until The Man’s car crashes. He wakes up in a hospital with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

Enter a small-town officer named Helen Chambers (Macdonald), engaged to an awful man named Ethan ( Greg Larsen ) and thrust into a mystery about who this handsome Irishman is in a hospital bed. When The Man finds a note with a time and a location in his pocket, he heads to a small town called Burnt Ridge, where he meets a woman named Luci ( Shalom Brune-Franklin ) who might know about his past, ends up crossing paths with a sociopath ( Ólafur Darri Ólafsson ) who clearly wants him dead, and gets a phone call from a man who’s been buried underground. And then things get even weirder.

Created by the people behind the excellent “ The Missing ” (which aired stateside on Starz), the writing on “The Tourist” is a metronomic back and forth between reveals and how those reveals propel the narrative in a new direction. Pushing their way through all the chaos are Dornan and Macdonald, both phenomenal. Dornan finds a quirky, unsettled way to play a man who doesn’t know who he is without resorting to the cliché of the lost soul. If anything, he leans into more of a blank slate interpretation of amnesia, playing a guy who’s more open to what comes next because he can’t remember what came before. And Macdonald is charming and so incredibly likable that she becomes the heart of a show that can be cold at times.

Echoes of “ Memento ” and “Fargo” aside, “The Tourist” also has its own quirky personality. Some of those quirks get a bit extreme in late-season episodes in ways I can’t spoil, but the show is never boring. It’s a reminder that the Dornan who was so great in “ The Fall ” is still out there, and I hope it leads him to more bizarre, challenging roles like this one. There’s an argument to be made that there’s an even-better 100-minute movie in this six-episode mini-series, but that’s not the world we’re in right now. A story like this has a better chance to be told in the TV system than the mid-budget film one, and the writers don’t drag their feet or spin their wheels like so many streaming thrillers. They’re constantly moving our hero forward, keeping us uncertain about his past and even his moral center.

Some will argue that “The Tourist” gets too convoluted and I’ll admit that I enjoyed the playful uncertainty of the first half of the season more than the intensity of the second half. Although the show does get deeper in how it unpacks lies we tell ourselves and those we listen to from other people. It turns out that everyone on "The Tourist" has a secret or two, and almost all of them could use a car accident to reset the hole they've dug for themselves. 

I'm not sure how intentional it is but the show never stopped reminding me of some of my favorite early Coen films—the noir danger of “ Blood Simple ,” the open roads of “ Raising Arizona ” (and a bearded hunter who seems unkillable), Macdonald’s very Marge Gunderson character—and yet these nods to greats are embedded in a breakneck plot that never slows down enough to distract from its own inspired storytelling. Take the trip.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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The Tourist (2022)

360 minutes

Jamie Dornan as The Man

Danielle Macdonald as Helen Chambers

Shalom Brune-Franklin as Luci

Damon Herriman as D.I. Lachlan Rogers

Alex Dimitriades as Kostas

Ólafur Darri Ólafsson as Billy

Greg Larsen as Ethan Krum

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The Tourist

When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him. When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him. When a man wakes up in the Australian outback with no memory, he must use the few clues he has to discover his identity before his past catches up with him.

• Harry Williams
• Jack Williams
• Jamie Dornan
• Danielle Macdonald
• Greg Larsen
• 356 User reviews
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• 4 wins & 13 nominations total

Episodes 12

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• Trivia The reason season 2 is set in Ireland was because Jamie Dorman didn't want to spend several month away in Australia again. The decision was made to relocate so Jamie could be close to his family
• Connections Featured in Jeremy Vine: Episode #5.5 (2022)

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• March 3, 2022 (United States)
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Season 1 – The Tourist

Where to watch, the tourist — season 1.

Watch The Tourist — Season 1 with a subscription on Netflix.

What to Know

Jamie Dornan makes for a compelling guide through The Tourist , a beguiling drama that deepens its mystery with solid shocks and welcome moments of levity.

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Jamie Dornan

Danielle Macdonald

Helen Chambers

Shalom Brune-Franklin

Luci Miller

Ólafur Darri Ólafsson

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‘The Tourist’ Thrills, but Doesn’t Take Itself Too Seriously

Even though the six-episode series, airing on HBO Max, is gripping and full of surprises, its creators made sure to include some offbeat humor.

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By Desiree Ibekwe

LONDON — After his car is rammed off the road by a mystery driver in a truck, a Northern Irishman wakes up in a hospital in the Australian outback with no memory of who he is. “I keep telling myself to just try and remember,” he tells the police officer that comes to take his statement, “but it’s like trying to make yourself fly.”

That is the starting gun for “The Tourist,” a six-part limited series that premieres Thursday on HBO Max. After the man, played by Jamie Dornan (“ Belfast ”), leaves the hospital, it becomes clear he was involved in some murky business in his former life, and someone definitely wants him dead.

The opening premise would suggest a typical thriller. Memory loss is a familiar plot device for the genre (see: “Memento,” “The Bourne Identity” et al). “The Tourist,” which first aired on the BBC in Britain this year, is similar in form to the broadcaster’s other tense, tight shows, such as “ The Night Manager ” and “ Bodyguard .”

Unlike those offerings, “The Tourist” adds more offbeat humor and touches of the surreal to a gripping central plot that still provides car chases, shootouts and international criminal outfits.

When he first read the script, Dornan found it surprising, he said in a recent interview. “Any time I thought it was one thing, or I had a handle on where it was heading, it was altered,” he said. “It was sometimes really subtle, and sometimes it was a big whack over the head.”

As the episodes unfurl, rooting for the confused, likable character becomes a little more complicated. In a recent interview, Dornan said that when he first read the script he wondered if the audience would still be on the man’s side, “searching for the answers when they find out what some of the answers are.”

Dornan’s character is joined in his hunt for answers by the police officer from the hospital, Helen Chambers ( Danielle Macdonald ), who is on her first assignment off traffic duty. She feels strangely compelled to help the man, who also finds assistance from Luci Miller (Shalom Brune-Franklin), a waitress he meets at a cafe.

The show’s setting in small-town Australia helps provide comic relief through characters like a hapless but well-meaning rookie police officer and the elderly owners of a bed-and-breakfast. Amid the chaos and danger, there are scenes that tip into the wholesome and heartwarming.

Helen, the police officer, is also an unlikely thriller protagonist: kind, honest and unassuming. Macdonald sees her character as the show’s “Everywoman,” she said in a recent interview. When we first meet Helen, it is clear that she is unhappy and underestimated, by herself and her fiancé.

Macdonald said that she had spent some time figuring out the character’s role in the plot. “The rest of the show is so dark and Helen was so light,” she said. “It ended up balancing really nicely.”

The show’s writers and creators, the brothers Jack and Harry Williams, have become known for conventional thrillers such as the Golden Globe-nominated show “ The Missing .” “The Tourist” came from a desire to do something different. “It’s the kind of show we’d watch, it’s the kind of show we really enjoy doing,” Jack said.

The brothers also have experience with dark-hearted television comedies, having been executive producers on Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “ Fleabag ” and on Daisy Haggard’s “ Back to Life .” Their latest show, then, was about “bridging that gap, because having made comedies and made drama, it just felt like a natural place for us to operate,” Harry Williams said.

They brought on Chris Sweeney, who also worked on “Back to Life,” to direct half of the series. Despite wanting to work on nondirectorial projects at the time, Sweeney said that he had been won over. “I don’t like straight thrillers, it’s not my thing, but I like things that use a device to talk about what is human existence in a playful way,” he said in a video interview.

“The Tourist” questions not only how the past defines us, but also — through the character trajectories of both the central character and of Helen — the other things we lean on to build our identities. Sweeney said that he felt the script had the “personality” of films he loves within the thriller genre, like the work of the Coen brothers. He described elements of the show as a “love letter” to those films, with scenes that evoke “ No Country for Old Men ” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight.”

Dornan was initially a little concerned about the show’s genre medley. While shooting in Australia, “the three of us, Shalom, Danielle and I, we were all in equal parts terrified at different moments because of the comedy and the drama, and how to find the comfortable line there,” he said. “I was a bit like, are people going to know what this is, or where to hang their hat on it?”

In Britain, at least, the concerns seem to have been unfounded. When “The Tourist” arrived on the BBC’s streaming service on New Year’s Day, it was met with glowing reviews and quickly became the platform’s third-most successful drama opening to date.

Jack Williams said he thought that the show had resonated with audiences, in part, because of its escapist quality, adding that it “isn’t trying to reflect back some of the angst and misery that everyone’s been experiencing for a few years.”

As well as diving into a mystery, viewers of “The Tourist” are transported to a stark, almost otherworldly landscape. The show was filmed across several different locations in the sprawling expanse of southern Australia, where you can “point the camera anywhere and it just looks incredible,” Harry Williams noted. “That said, we had to travel quite a lot of hours within the outback in order to get that desired effect,” he added.

The travel contributed to the shoot’s lasting five months, a period of filming that was also stretched by the ambition of the show: The opening car chase sequence was filmed over two weeks. “It was the hardest job I’ve ever done,” Dornan said. “It’s the longest job I’ve ever done.”

With the show’s success in Britain has come discussion about the possibility of a second season. The show was conceived as a self-contained mini-series, similar to the BBC’s other six-part shows. That “less is more” approach contrasts with the sprawling nature of much of American network television; Showtime’s thriller “Homeland,” for example, ran for eight seasons and 96 episodes.

Tommy Bulfin, a BBC drama commissioning editor, said in an email that, while the broadcaster has a “tradition of doing six episode runs,” ultimately the practice of doing shorter productions was down to the subject matter. “I think the key to the success of these shows is that they’re all excellent examples of brilliantly crafted stories,” he said.

The Williams brothers echoed that sentiment. In thinking about the length of “The Tourist,” the story took precedence. “You have to kind of follow that and the natural course that it would take and not try and squeeze out more,” Harry said. The pair wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a second season, but added that they were cautious about doing so.

“There is no perfect length, just like there’s no perfect length for a book,” Harry Williams said. “But there is an appropriate length for a story.”

Desiree Ibekwe is a news assistant on the Audio team. Before joining The Times in 2020, she was a reporter at Broadcast Magazine and completed a fellowship at The Economist.  More about Desiree Ibekwe

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