There is a genre of prestige television that dresses inherited wealth in tasteful linens and asks you to admire the drapes. Sky's new six-part series Possession is not that show. It is something considerably more unsettling — a legal thriller that arrives in Jamaica, looks the history of sugar plantation slavery directly in the face, and then asks what it would take for the dead to refuse to stay quiet about it.

The setup is deceptively clean. Claudia, a sharp London solicitor played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, is dispatched to the island after a wealthy British client dies and his will delivers a shock: his entire £50 million estate — a fortune traceable to his family's ownership of a Jamaican sugar plantation — has been cut away from his biological daughter and left instead to a young Afro-Caribbean woman no one in his circle has ever heard of. Claudia's job is to establish whether the will is legitimate. What she finds at the plantation property known as Hope Hill is something for which no amount of legal training prepares you.

The series is the work of writer Kris Mrksa, and it earns its supernatural turn by doing the slower, harder work first. The colonial history is not backdrop. It is load-bearing architecture. Hope Hill is portrayed not as picturesque ruin but as a site of accumulated trauma — a place where the mechanisms of enslavement are rendered with a specificity that most British prestige drama carefully avoids. The show understands that horror, as a genre, has always been most potent when it externalises a real and unresolved wound, and the wound here is about as unresolved as British history gets.

Mbatha-Raw, who has spent years navigating the particular pressure placed on Black British actresses to be palatable and cross-demographic, gives her most committed performance in years. Claudia is not a surrogate for audience reassurance. She is a woman whose professional rationalism — her whole armour — is being systematically stripped away by what she encounters. The performance is interior and physical at once, and it carries the show through its more conventionally creepy passages.

Jonny Lee Miller plays the deceased's solicitor, a man with the smooth surface and evasive eyes that the role demands. The show is perceptive about how legal and financial structures serve as laundering mechanisms — not just for money, but for moral responsibility. The estate exists. The money is real. The question of who is owed it, and by what logic, is where Possession stops being a whodunnit and starts being something more uncomfortable.

The supernatural element — spirit possession, encoded in the title and signalled early — is where the show will split its audience. Viewers who want their historical reckoning kept within the bounds of realism may find it a step too far. That reaction is understandable, but it arguably misreads what the writers are doing. The possession framework draws on Caribbean spiritual traditions — specifically the Jamaican Afro-syncretic belief systems that emerged from the period of enslavement itself, as acts of cultural survival and resistance — and treats them with consistency and internal logic rather than as exotic horror dressing. The show is making a theological argument: that the spiritual vocabulary developed by enslaved people to process and resist their condition is the correct lens through which their unfinished business should be understood. You don't have to agree with that argument to recognise it as one being made deliberately.

The production design is striking without being showy. Jamaica is filmed as a place of genuine complexity — lush, layered, alive with its own present-tense identity — rather than the colonial postcard or the crime-drama backdrop it has been reduced to in too much British television. The cinematography treats the landscape as a character with its own memory.

The show is not flawless. Its middle episodes carry some of the structural sag that seems endemic to the six-part prestige format, and a subplot involving the daughter cut from the will occasionally idles when it should accelerate. But these are craft problems, not failures of nerve. Possession is doing something that the bulk of British television will not: it is looking at where old money came from, naming it plainly, and suggesting — with genuine dramatic force — that the reckoning is not, in fact, over. Whether the dead can enforce that reckoning is the supernatural question. Whether the living should is the one that lingers after the credits.