TV : Crime : TV quality : English
The Take
         is a new four-part serial, adapted from the best-selling novel by Martina Cole, airing on SKy One and starring Tom Hardy (Bronson, Stuart A Life Backwards) as Freddie Jackson.

Just out of jail, he’s done his time, made the right connections and now he’s ready to use them. With his faithful cousin Jimmy (Shaun Evans) by his side, Freddie is ready to take on the world. His wife Jackie (Kierston Wareing) dreams of having her husband home but she’s forgotten the rows and the girls Freddie can’t leave alone.

At first Freddie gets everything he ever wanted and Jimmy is taken along for the ride, the two creating a growing crime empire that gives them all the respect and money they’ve hungered for. But behind it all sits Ozzy (Brian Cox) - a legendary criminal godfather who manipulates Freddie and Jimmy’s fates from behind the bars of his prison cell.

Bitter, resentful and increasingly unstable, Jackie sees her life crumble while her little sister Maggie’s (Charlotte Riley) star rises. In love with Jimmy, Maggie is determined not to end up like her sister. Freddie and Jackie watch Jimmy and Maggie achieve all the dreams that they themselves failed to realise: love, family, stability and respect. 

Freddie soon proves himself to be unpredictably violent and extremely dangerous.

A jealous resentment and an inability to control himself force Freddie to put both the business and family at risk. Torn between being loyal to a cousin he loves and being true to his own destiny, Jimmy is forced to decide between protecting Freddie or the life he has built with Maggie…

Cole, one of the UK’s most prolific crime writers and the author of fifteen novels set in London’s gangland, comments: “The Take was my era – I wanted to capture that. The times changed then – the family dynamics changed. Every now and then I like to go back and take people back to another era and show them how something began.”