The Undeclared War

The Undeclared War is a British near-future thriller television series. The series is written by Peter Kosminsky, and follows two main characters, Saara Parvin in the UK and Vadim Trusov in Russia, during a cyber and misinformation attack upon the UK.. The first series aired from 30 June 2022 on Channel 4. Channel 4 announced on 12 February 2025 that a second series consisting of six episodes would be produced.

Plot

Parvin has just started a one-year student-placement at GCHQ when a cyber-attack takes down some of the UK Internet and she joins the team examining the code of the malware. She is praised when she discovers a second attack within the code and a diligent search for a third attack doesn't find one.
Meanwhile, she feels alienated within GCHQ but makes friends with John Yeabsley, who spends his lunch-time correcting the grammar of other people's blogs. He, in turn, says how alienating it is to not be able to talk about his work outside. It is later shown that Parvin has not told her family where she is working and her brother is appalled when she finally tells him.
Trusov had attended a class with Parvin in London and when he returns to Russia he starts working for Russia's Twitter-misinformation campaign, but when the UK crash the facility as reprisal for the malware he reluctantly joins the offensive malware department.
Russia escalates the attack and incites unrest in the UK by interfering with the reporting of a general election, whereupon the UK remotely destroys some Russian arms dumps. Russia exaggerate the damage and uses it as a pretext for isolating GCHQ from the NSA by leaking NSA software from a UK site.
Trusov eventually reveals that this was all planned by Russia and he deliberately and openly leaks all the Russian software to GCHQ as a gift that the UK can use to appeal for help from the USA just as the tit-for-tat reprisals become overtly physical. In the last scene, Parvin stands stricken with grief because Trusov has sacrificed himself.

Cast

Hannah Khalique-Brown as Saara Parvin, a second-year computer science student
Simon Pegg as Danny Patrick, GCHQ Head of Operations
Maisie Richardson-Sellers as Kathy Freeman, an NSA analyst detailed to GCHQ
Edward Holcroft as James Cox, a teacher and Saara's live-in boyfriend
Adrian Lester as Prime Minister Andrew Makinde
Alex Jennings as David Neal, Director of GCHQ
Mark Rylance as John Yeabsley, a longtime employee of GCHQ
Alfie Friedman as Gabriel Davies, a GCHQ mathematician and code breaker
Kerry Godliman as Angie McMurray, the head of Russia Global News in the UK
German Segal as Vadim Trusov, a Russian programmer, and the son of a wealthy and influential Russian arms dealer, from whom Vadim is estranged
Joss Porter as Phil, a GCHQ analyst
Tinatin Dalakishvili as Marina Veselova, a Russian journalist and single mother
Episodes

Music

The music in series was assembled by Debbie Wiseman and most notably included in several places throughout the series a folk adaptation of the Cossack lament written by Nikolai Verevkin, Under the green willow. The version in the show was provided by the London-based singers Evelyn Bates and Violet Verigo whose rendition is influenced by Pelageya's performance.

Release

In the United States, the series was released on Peacock.

Reception

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 69% of 26 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.4/10.

Controversy

The show's June 2022 adverts were inspired by the panic-provoking 1938 radio adaption of The War of the Worlds, and subject to complaints to the UK broadcasting regulator Ofcom due to the adverts being broadcast as if they were live news broadcasts. The few complainants had focused on the fact that the Prime Minister himself had appeared on screenseemingly unable to discern that it was black actor Adrian Lester, in a country which has never had a black PM, rather than actual white-skinned PM Boris Johnson, then in his third year in officewhich had made them panic about a pending attack. Ofcom simply acknowledged that the complaints had been received, and no further comments were ever issued by the organisation.