David Mitchell’s Ludwig is the biggest new scripted show in Britain this year
The first episode of the second series of Ludwig has now been watched by 9.1 million people, the BBC said on Monday, which makes it the biggest launch of any scripted show this year on any British channel or streamer. Mitchell plays a Cambridge puzzle-setter who poses as his missing twin brother, a police detective, and a third series is already being filmed.
28 September 2026
Photo: Txllxt TxllxT, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Counted over the 28 days after it aired, the opening episode of Ludwig’s second series puts the show ahead of every other scripted launch of 2026 across broadcasters and streamers, including Prime Video’s The Night Manager at 8.7 million and the BBC’s own Small Prophets at 7.6 million, according to Deadline.
The six-part series finished on BBC One last Thursday, 24 September, with 1.6 million watching the final episode that night, and Deadline noted that catch-up viewing on iPlayer is where the show built its numbers: 5.5 million people have streamed the first episode there, the BBC said, the second-biggest iPlayer opening for a BBC comedy this year.
It did not match the year’s biggest unscripted show, the BBC’s The Traitors, which had a consolidated audience of 13.3 million, Deadline reported.
The show
Mitchell plays John “Ludwig” Taylor, a puzzle-setter with no computer, no mobile phone and no television, who rarely goes further than his own front door, until his identical twin, James, a detective chief inspector with Cambridge’s Major Investigations Team, disappears, according to the BBC’s description of the show.
James’s wife, Lucy, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, persuades John to take his brother’s place at the police station to look for clues, and he ends up solving murders while pretending to be him.
Photo: Irving Liaw, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
When filming started in January 2024, Mitchell said he had loved the genre since he watched Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple with his parents at the age of 10. He studied at Peterhouse, one of the Cambridge colleges, and told the college he was “extremely fond of Cambridge and loved my student days, so it was terrific to be back there to film Ludwig”.
“Sometimes the only thing that can bring the whole family together is murder.”David Mitchell, when filming began in January 2024
The show was created and is written by Mark Brotherhood and made by Big Talk Studios in association with That Mitchell and Webb Company, and its first series won an International Emmy and was the BBC’s top-rated scripted launch of 2024, according to the BBC and Deadline.
What comes next
Ludwig will return this Christmas with a special episode guest starring Sir David Suchet, and filming is already under way on a third series of six hour-long episodes, the BBC said, with Chris Foggin as lead director.
“Ludwig is a gloriously eccentric detective at the heart of a show that has never played by the usual rules, so to see more than nine million people embrace him is genuinely thrilling,” said Kenton Allen, the chief executive of Big Talk Studios, who added that John’s way of solving crimes would be “confusing criminals, colleagues and himself for a while yet”.
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