Published June 12, 2026, 5:30 p.m. ET

After premiering on BBC One in 2024, The Listeners makes its way to the US via Starz. Adapted by Jordan Tannahill from his 2021 novel of the same name, and directed by Janicza Bravo, the four-episode series stars Rebecca Hall as a woman whose successful, rewarding life is turned upside down by a mysterious hum. What’s that sound coming out of the hole in the wood? Or maybe it’s the cell towers near her home? All she knows for sure is that no one else can hear it, and family’s starting to look at her sideways. 

THE LISTENERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: The human ear in close-up. “I couldn’t imagine how my life could unravel so completely.” Then again, maybe she could.

The Gist: The woman we meet, as overlapping sound edits and flash-forwards reveal a kind of growing chaos in her life, is Claire (Hall), who teaches literature at a prep school in suburban Manchester, England. She has a loving husband in Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah), and their daughter Ashley (Mia Tharia) attends Claire’s school. But she gets a nosebleed one day while teaching Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and it’s in conjunction with a growing, pulsating rumble. Claire plugs her ears and the noise is gone. She unplugs them, and it returns with a vengeance. The closed-captions in The Listeners describe it as “buzzing static.” But Claire is the only one in her life who can hear it.

She tells Paul she’s just been sleeping badly. She reassures Ash that everything is OK, she’s not turning weird. But the sound will not diminish, and Claire starts to go full Fox Mulder as she investigates local power lines and the appliances in her home. Paul encourages tests. The otology clinic has no answers, and Claire being inserted bodily into an MRI machine only merges the technology with her singular auditory mystery. Ashley worries for her mother. There’s gossip at school. People are noticing her nosebleeds and strange, distracted behavior.

There is precedent for this in the real world, a source-undefined hum, heard by percentages of the population in various places all over the globe. But while Claire trolls through the theories of TikToks and YouTubers, nothing helps, and nothing stops the noise from growing. Hounding her. Tension grows alongside this grating murmur, at home and at work, and Claire finally wonders if she’s actually losing her mind. She is overwhelmed and struck speechless when an unlikely ally appears. “The sound, the one that’s always there…I thought I was the only one who could hear it.” That is exactly what Claire has been telling everyone in her life, and together, no matter the consequences, they will search for the sound of truth.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Before this series adaptation, Jordan Tannahill’s original The Listeners novel, published in 2021, was adapted into an opera by composer Missy Mazzoli. After making its initial US debut in Philadelphia in 2024, it has continued to receive acclaim.

We’re also channeling a bit of Black Mirror with The Listeners, an anthology series that in various ways has messed with the mysteries and technologies that mess with us.

And remember the beginning of 3 Body Problem? Auggie seeing a numbered countdown in her line of sight when no one else could? That same maddening confusion drives the early going of The Listeners.

Our Take: Television is a visual medium, so how do they make a show out of a sound? How do they show it? How do they convey it, when almost no one besides Claire can hear it? The answer starts with hiring Rebecca Hall to be the person who can. Hall is absolutely captivating in The Listeners, even when she’s literally just listening, and it’s a mixture of the grace in her physical form and the dissonance she expresses as the noise envelops her character. 

Claire will embark on a life-changing trek in The Listeners, which asks even more of a television show based around something so diffuse. (It delivers on this with real, sometimes frightening character growth, something M. Night Shyamalan couldn’t really manage with the weaponized wind of The Happening.) But in the meantime, it also effectively depicts ambient background noise, which we all accept as part of modernity, as a potential menace hiding in plain sight. Maybe a power line’s buzzing static is trying to tell us something about how we live, if only we would really listen.

Performance Worth Watching: See above; Rebecca Hall is just masterful here, appearing to make physical what we cannot see.  

Sex and Skin: Some suggestion.

Parting Shot: Claire has made a decision that goes against everything that binds her to this existence. Her professional ethics, the relationships in her personal life. “Sounds” like a bad idea? But she is compelled. 

Sleeper Star: As Claire continues to explore what her husband calls “your noise,” she will encounter Jo, someone in the know. Jo is played by Gayle Rankin, who you’ll recall as the intense seer and whisperer of Daemon’s visions in Season 2 of House of the Dragon. 

Most Pilot-y Line: “I’m fine, I’m just tired.” It’s what we all say when we can’t explain how we feel to others. “Um, I’m just, uh, I’m just hearing this low, deep noise somewhere in the background. Can anyone else?” They can’t, and Claire’s getting freaked out.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Let Rebecca Hall guide you down a rabbit hole of auditory madness — and maybe a kind of ecstasy? — in The Listeners. We heard you’re gonna love it.