Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Inheritance’ On BritBox, Where Three Siblings Want To Know How Their Father Dies After They Find Out He Changed His Will

The Inheritance ( now streaming on BritBox ) is about three unpleasant siblings who are all going after their father’s fortune. Sound familiar? Yes, there are definitely some Succession vibes here, but the father isn’t the CEO of a media conglomerate, just a man who may or may not have been poisoned by people who the siblings never met until after he died.

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Heartstopper’ Season 3 On Netflix, Where Charlie Expresses His Love For Nick, But Nick Worries About Charlie’s Health

Opening Shot: Woods and a trailer. A home video DVD plays on a small TV in the trailer, depicting three siblings at their father’s house to celebrate his birthday.

Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Very Royal Scandal’ On Prime Video, A Dramatization Of Prince Andrew’s Controversial 2019 Interview About His Association With Jeffrey Epstein

The Gist: Daniel (Robert James-Collier), Chloe (Jemima Rooper) and Sian (Gaynor Faye) are fairly typical siblings at mid-life; they’re busy with their own lives to the point where they don’t visit with their dad, Dennis Watson (Larry Lamb), as often as they like. And, as we see from the birthday party video, the three of them don’t have the warmest relationship with each other.

Daniel drives up to the house where they grew up, ostensibly to ask Dennis for a loan to help out his struggling restaurant. But when he enters the house, he sees first responders surrounding his body, unable to revive him.

CLICK HERE TO GET EMAILS FROM DECIDER

The siblings find out from the coroner that Dennis died from alcohol asphyxiation, exacerbated by sleeping pills he took. That news is shocking to all of them, given that they didn’t know their father to be a big drinker.

As they get ready to sell their father’s home, though, they find out from his estate solicitor that he changed his will shortly before his death, giving everything to Susan (Samantha Bond), a woman he recently married that none of the siblings new anything about. In addition, he is going to be cremated instead of buried next to their mother, as was the initial plan.

Of course, they’re flabbergasted, and they think that Dennis was somehow coerced into changing the will. They try to give the coroner more information, including Sian’s discovery of a mostly-empty bottle of Bioethanol in the trash. But the coroner says the results of the autopsy are clear: Dennis did this to himself. She does reveal that Dennis was also on meds to help with dementia, which is another condition that the siblings knew nothing about.

Daniel goes and visits an old friend of his father’s, who wants nothing to do with him even in death; apparently, Dennis’ new wife used to be married to him. Then Susan comes by the house to introduce herself to the siblings, which of course generates nothing but rancor. But she says she and Dennis were together for 14 years, and she wanted to be introduced to his kids, but he never took that step. And, yes, he had dementia for about a year and was in rapid decline.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We compare a lot of shows to Succession , and this one might be a stretch, but there the strained familial situation of both shows is similar.

Our Take: Written by Aschlin Ditta, The Inheritance tries to combine the show’s central mystery with the goings on in the personal lives of the three siblings at the show’s center. Chloe seems to have a stable family life with her husband Pete (Adil Ray) and their kids. Daniel, with nowhere else to turn, borrows money Glen (Kevin Harvey), a loan shark he’s done business with in the past. Sian is a single mom who’s been going on a lot of bad dates lately, but seems to connect with Nathan (Rory Fleck Byrne) a real estate agent who came by the house to see if they’re putting it on the market.

Some of this seems connected to what happened to Dennis, mostly involving Daniel and the money he thought he was getting, but other aspects of it don’t, at least not at first. In fact, it feels like material that’s used to make what is essentially a 100-or-so-minute movie into a 180-minute miniseries, which is never a good sign.

There definitely needs to be a lot more parsed out about the Watson family during the subsequent three episodes. For one, when did the relationship between them get so frosty, and two, when and why did their relationship with Dennis get so distant? After all, they had no idea Susan even existed, much less that he had dementia and had started drinking more heavily.

Of course, there’s more to it than that, as we see in a brief scene where a vacant-looking Dennis seems to take a glass of scotch from someone offscreen. Was he poisoned with the bioethanol to mimic the signs of dementia, and then was given enough alcohol to kill him? How and what involvement does Susan have with this scheme? And just what is in Dennis’ estate that’s so valuable someone would be willing to kill him to get it?

There’s a lot to unpack, more than enough to not have to worry too much about the personal lives of the siblings. However, if these details come into play regarding what happened to Dennis, then we’re all for whatever sidetracks Ditta wants to make.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: During the funeral, the coroner bursts in with a couple of police officers before Dennis can be cremated; she tells the funeral director they’re going to need the body.

Sleeper Star: In the scene where Samantha Bond first appears as Susan, the character strides in confidently and makes all three siblings look foolish for actually being incredulous about her secret marriage to their father. Imagine that!

Most Pilot-y Line: “I can see this is a bit of a shock,” the solicitor says to the siblings after they find out about Susan for the first time. The way she says it is so understated it’s almost comical.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We like the cast of The Inheritance enough to keep watching, but it feels that the show is too distracted by lots of side stories to really concentrate on the mystery at its center.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

For more entertainment news and streaming recommendations, visit decider.com