True Detective Meets Haunting Of Hill House In 6-Part Thriller Inspired By Real Events

Published Sep 27, 2026, 10:45 PM EDT

Dhruv is a Lead Writer in Screen Rant's New TV division. He has been consistently contributing to the website for over two years and has written thousands of articles covering streaming trends, movie/TV analysis, and pop culture breakdowns.
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True Detective and The Haunting of Hill House are easily among the most compelling shows of their respective genre. While True Detective season 1 is usually ranked among the greatest crime thrillers of our time, The Haunting of Hill House serves as a miniseries that delivers one of the best takes on classic horror literature.

A relatively obscure thriller series that premiered almost three years ago seems to have some of the best ingredients from both True Detective season 1 and The Haunting of Hill House. The show in question, The Woman in the Wall, has just six episodes and premiered on BBC One in 2023. It never gained the same mainstream attention as True Detective and The Haunting of Hill House.

Even from a critical standpoint, The Woman in the Wall received fairly positive reviews from the viewers and critics who watched it. However, nothing about the series spelled extraordinary. Yet, in hindsight, it is hard not to remember the show as one of the finest thrillers that subtly introduces ambiguous supernatural elements, reminding one of shows like True Detective and The Haunting of Hill House.

Woman In The Wall Combines True Detective’s Thrills With Hill House’s Chills

Similar to True Detective, The Woman in the Wall features an unlikely pair, Lorna Brady (Ruth Wilson) and Detective Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack), as its leads. Like Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, the two characters find themselves deeply embroiled in a conspiracy involving decades of institutional cover-ups in Louisiana.

Following the same "troubled detective" trope as True Detective, The Woman in the Wall shows how Akande remains deeply obsessed with the central case as he unravels his own past trauma while getting to the bottom of the central mystery. Meanwhile, Lorna almost seems to have a hinted supernatural connection with the overarching case.

The show truly becomes reminiscent of True Detective season 1 and The Haunting of Hill House when it embraces elements of horror. Just like Mike Flanagan uses ghosts as visual metaphors for grief and childhood trauma, The Woman in the Wall highlights how Lorna's sleepwalking and hallucinations blur the line between real supernatural encounters and psychological disassociation.

A gothic atmosphere also looms throughout the series' runtime as it walks through the story of an unreliable narrator. While its procedural aspects and dynamic central duo remind one of HBO's True Detective, its portrayal of how lingering "ghosts" from the past can distort one's present seems reminiscent of The Haunting of Hill House.

The Woman In The Wall's Story Draws From Disturbing Real-Life Events

The Haunting of Hill House and True Detective are both incredible shows in their own right. There is a reason why they are still considered the benchmarks for shows of their respective genres. The Woman in the Wall may not be as narratively sound as the two, but it does prove to be more disturbing when it draws from real-life events.

Instead of walking viewers through a fictional mystery drama, The Woman in the Wall centers its story around Ireland’s controversial Magdalene laundries. It gives a disturbing view of how, from the 18th century until 1996, religious institutions forcibly incarcerated over 10,000 women and girls deemed "fallen," subjecting them to physical abuse and unpaid labor.

The unmarried pregnant women in these Magdalene laundries were also separated from their newborns. Through Akande's story, The Woman in the Wall even portrays how the birth certificates of these children were then forged, so the children could secretly be adopted out to more privileged families.

Some of the flashback scenes in The Woman in the Wall are extremely heartbreaking as they capture how decades-long institutional silence was maintained surrounding these real-life atrocities. In these moments, the show seems even more disturbing than True Detective and The Haunting of Hill House.

The Woman in the Wall