"Still feeling intense over this is england last night!", "Was shaking watching This Is England", "This is England 86 - best bit of telly I've seen", “TIE 86 best thing on telly, never watching it again.” Just a few of the tweets pouring onto the internet less than 24 hours after the conclusion of Shane Meadows' spin-off series from his BAFTA winning film, "This Is England".
See our list of Best Crime Dramas to binge on Netflix
This four-part drama, picking up three years after the events of the original film, has become an instant TV classic. An instant British TV classic. The combination of bleak story lines acted out by characters who can make you laugh as well as cry is unique to these shores.
US dramas, while amazing are weighed down by their enormous season runs that require writers to eek out story lines over 24 episodes a year, for up to a decade, in the case of The Sopranos. France's Spiral - a gritty police drama focusing on the seedy side of police work - always felt a little too self-satisfied. This Is England '86 however, left you feeling like you'd just gone 12 rounds as Vladimir Klitchsko's's emotional punchbag.
The show marks what has been a vintage year for British drama. In the spring we had the dark psychological crime drama Luther starring Idris Elba in the titular role of a police officer with a seedy underside. And who could forget Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss' brilliant modern retelling of the Sherlock Holmes series starring the best-named actor of all time, Benedict Cumberbatch on the BBC?
But does TIE trump the lot? Is it, in fact, the greatest British drama ever put to telly? Vote in our poll on the right.