Say Nothing’s Revolution Will Be Television

FX is going extra hard this year. After a sweeping performance led by Shōgun at the Emmys, the network will close out 2024 with another epic period piece, Say Nothing. The limited series traces “the Troubles,” the decadeslong conflict between the United Kingdom and Northern Irish revolutionaries, through the lives of several major players and one family piecing together the remnants of its collateral damage.

Adapted by Josh Zetumer from Patrick Radden Keefe’s acclaimed 2018 nonfiction book of the same name, the series grapples with the legacy of the Troubles from the 1960s to today via parallel viewpoints: a group of young revolutionaries who would become key fighters in the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the ten children of a woman who goes missing in Belfast in 1972. The cast of predominantly Irish actors, many of whom are from Northern Ireland, includes Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe as Dolours and Marian Price, sisters who played vital roles in the Old Bailey bombing in London — the IRA’s first major attack in England during the Troubles — and whose hunger strike in prison became a defining episode in the conflict. Anthony Boyle, who’s having a breakout year with Masters of the Air and Manhunt, plays Brendan Hughes, a notable leader of the Provisional IRA, while Baby Reindeer’s Josh Finan stars as a young Gerry Adams.

Adams, of course, spent the past several decades as president of Sinn Féin, the Irish political party, until his retirement in 2018. He remains very much alive and continues to deny his involvement in the IRA to this day — a stance that directly conflicts with the show and the book’s unequivocal position on his standing as a leader in the group. With a trailer highlighting the revolutionaries’ youthful fervor before culminating in a note about the costs of war, Say Nothing seems intent on leaning hard into the complications of a conflict not yet resolved. History is the final battleground. All nine episodes premiere on Hulu November 14.