In November, 1983, £26 million of gold bullion was stolen from the Brink’s-Mat warehouse near Heathrow Airport. The thing about the heist was that the armed robbers had no idea that gold would be there; they were looking for about £1 million in foreign currency they knew was there. What happens in the aftermath of this accidental heist, one of the biggest in British history, has been fictionalized in a new series.

THE GOLD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: As a security guard mumbles along to “Back On The Chain Gang”, he pours four coffees. He comes out and gives coffees to his colleagues. Suddenly, armed robbers bust into their office. “London, 26th November, 1983.”

The Gist: The robbers somehow know the keycodes to get through layers of security gates, and they bring two guards with them to get into the vault, where lots of foreign currency is being stored. As one of the guards fumbles to remember the key code, one of the robbers looks over and smiles at what he sees. We don’t see it, but there’s a massive pile of gold bullion just sitting there.

The robbery was at the Brink’s-Mat warehouse, near Heathrow Airport. And the robbers somehow managed to get 3 tons of bullion — worth almost £26 million — in their van.

DIs Nicki Jennings (Charlotte Spencer) and Tony Brightwell (Emun Elliott) of the Metropolitan Police’s “Flying Squad” – i.e. their major crimes division — get the call about the robbery. They find out about the gold, which was just there temporarily, waiting to be transported to Hong Kong the next morning.

In the meantime, Micky McAvoy (Adam Nagaitis), the leader of the robbery gang, brings in Kenny Noye (Jack Lowden), whom he doesn’t know but has heard is one of the only people who can fence a haul like this. Noye knows what has to be done, given the scrutiny this robbery will get: Get the gold out of South London and put it and the money its worth back in the economy without arousing suspicion.

Kenny recruits John Palmer (Tom Cullen), who actually owns and operates a crucible in the woods near his home; John can take a pure gold ingot, melt it down and mask its purity, then fence the resulting bar. And with news of the robbery circulating, the value of black-market gold is skyrocketing.

Jennings and Brightwell find out that this case is too big for even the Flying Squad to handle; Brian Boyce (Hugh Bonneville), Scotland Yard’s former number 2 in the counterterrorism division, is leading a special task force into investigating the robbery. At first, he just wants the detectives’ files on the case, but Jennings convinces him that they have valuable insights, given that they were the first on the scene.

One of them is the security guard they encountered with a shiner, who claimed that he hid like a scared child. His story didn’t add up, and the robbery crew needed some sort of inside man, so Boyce and the detectives manage to get him to pin things on McAvoy.

Another aspect of trying to fence the gold is laundering the money once the gold is sold off. For that, Kenny contacts Edwyn Cooper (Dominic Cooper), a barrister who has made his name known defending corrupt cops and South London criminals; he gets in touch via Gordon Parry (Sean Harris), a fraudster who has worked with Cooper in the past. The proposal is to funnel the money through Swiss bank accounts and shell corporations that invest in riverfront real estate development projects. And while Kenny thinks the wealthy, proper-seeming Cooper can be intimidated by the South London crime bigwigs Kenny knows, “men who are from the streets,” into taking a 10% cut, Cooper responds, “I am from those fucking streets,” tells him he knows it’s Brink’s-Mat money, and demands 25%.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Even though The Gold is based on a true story, in a lot of ways it plays out like a pretty standard British cop show, along the lines of Line Of Duty.

Our Take: Created by Neil Forsyth, The Gold has a lot of layers, and while Forsyth manages to set up all the major players and their motivations in the first hour of the series, it still somehow manages to be a bit of a slog, with a fair bit of character-building scenes that don’t add much to the story.

We’re not saying that all of those character-building scenes are unnecessary, though. There’s a scene where Cooper talks to his wife Isabelle (Ruth Bradley) about being able to live the lavish lifestyle they lead without having to be dependent on her family’s money to do it. Also, in his discussions with Kenny about laundering the proceeds from the sale of the gold, he communicates that his upper-crust demeanor has been cultivated over the years and is by no means an indication of where he’s come from.

That helps us see just where Cooper is coming from, why he is willing to engage in such a risky endeavor and somehow confidently think he can manage it. Some of the other character-setting scenes, like the cops in the Flying Squad complaining about their retiring boss asking them to revisit cases, or Kenny hunting in the woods fill in some color but feel more like filler.

What The Gold is supposed to show is how involved this case was; Boyce tells Jennings and Brightwell that he’s more interested in following the money than nicking the people who did the initial robbery. That makes for a more interesting drama as well, taking it from simple “cops and robbers,” as Boyce says, to seeing just who handles this money and where it goes. Of course, that makes for a much more difficult case, but definitely one that could be told over a half-dozen episodes.

The performances are spot-on, especially Bonneville as Boyce and Lowden as Kenny; they seem to be the alpha figures on either side of this case, given their respective desires for power and control. We especially enjoyed Lowden’s ability to play Kenny as a working-class bloke with upper-class ambitions, not unlike Cooper but with a lot more of the rough edges that the barrister managed to sand down a long time ago.

There’s also somewhat of a backstory with Jennings, how her father was one of Boyce’s big targets when Boyce was working the Flying Squad, but that didn’t have enough time to germinate in the first episode.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As Kenny monologues to Micky over the phone about how every so often, working-class folks like him became kings, but didn’t hold onto power long because they couldn’t handle it, Boyce and the detectives go to the storage locker where the gold was stored and find it empty. Kenny says into his phone, “I can handle it, Micky. I can be the king.”

Sleeper Star: Stefanie Martini plays John Palmer’s wife Marnie, and she seems to have some influence over him, and may even be a big part of his crucible operation.

Most Pilot-y Line: Between Kenny and John, there’s a lot of lip-smacking, gum chewing and tongue clucking that becomes a distraction, especially in the scene where Kenny shows John the ingot he took from the nicked pile, to see what he can do with it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While there are a lot of scene of just people talking that don’t add much to the overall story, The Gold still paints an interesting picture of a massive accidental heist and its aftermath.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.