Channel 4's 'Brian & Maggie' to Debut on PBS in October

There is something deeply satisfying about seeing a show you've been obsessively following since it was announced, and after two years of emailing around to PBS asking if public broadcasting is picking up, finally, FINALLY, someone says yes. It's even better when that show is one you have been absolutely dying to see, both because of the actors involved and the material. In this case, the series in question is Brian & Maggie (formerly Brian and Margaret), which debuted on Channel 4 in the spring of 2025, starring Steve Coogan as Brian Walden and Dame Harriet Walter as Margaret Thatcher, and it will debut on most PBS stations starting in October 2025.

A brief bit of history for those who weren't alive in the 1980s: Margaret Thatcher, the only woman to have been elected Prime Minister in the U.K., was not a universally beloved figure. While she wasn't a full-on dictator, she espoused a pale variation of the theme with her Thatcherism, "authoritarian individualism." She ran roughshod over Liberals and Labour alike, dismantling major reforms that had made people's lives better in the name of lining the pockets of the rich. She had cops embed in Labour-leaning towns, posing as ordinary citizens, reporting on their neighbors to MI-5 for decades.

But like any thin-skinned autocrat, part of the reason she held power for so long is that no one in the press had the stones to push back.... until someone asked BBC anchor Brian Walden to do it.