Hugh Bonneville is back as Ian Fletcher in Twenty Twenty Six, the latest chapter in the satirical series that once made him the ’s “head of deliverance” and later its “head of values.” The new show, described as a sequel to Twenty Twelve and W1A, puts Fletcher in Miami as FIFA’s “head of integrity” working with a group of Americans, a Canadian and a Mexican to help pull off the summer’s World Cup.
The Canadian premiere is set for First and Britbox, and Bonneville said the character has been “parachuted in to take over his job” in a fictional parallel universe. He added that Fletcher has “sorted out the and left it in great, great fettle,” while leaving viewers to “join the dots” for themselves.
The series matters now because Bonneville has just stepped away from another of his signature roles, retiring recently as Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, in Downton Abbey, and is returning to a character built for institutional satire. Twenty Twenty Six was shot last summer in July, with John Morton again creating the show and using Fletcher to skew British systems, this time through the machinery of global soccer and the World Cup.
That setup gives the new series a harder edge than a simple callback. Paulo Costanzo, who is from Toronto, plays a hard-nosed New York lawyer, while Stephen Kunken, who is from New York, plays a passionate supporter of Vancouver. The cast and setting stretch the satire beyond Britain, but the joke still depends on the same old Fletcher formula: a man dropped into a mess he did not create and expected to tidy it up.
Bonneville said that, in the current climate, “Satire or comedy is getting harder and harder to create when the real world is writing its own jokes.” That is the real test for Twenty Twenty Six. If Fletcher once stood in for Britain’s faith in grand plans and polished institutions, this time he is being sent into a world where the absurdity is already built in.