A new six-part British crime series called Blue Season is putting Vietnamese characters front and centre of a London detective story — and it's directed by a Vietnamese woman who trained at Ealing Studios. The show, now streaming on the Galaxy Play platform, follows two detectives, Mackie and Jules, as they hunt a serial killer who resurfaces after years of silence. It runs at roughly 30 minutes an episode and is rated 18+.
Director Zen Nguyen, born Nguyen Xuan Yen, studied marketing communications in Europe before taking formal directing training at MetFilm School on the historic Ealing Studios grounds in the UK. Her break came partly through hands-on experience on the set of Slow Horses (2022), the Gary Oldman spy thriller, plus earlier work as a production manager on Vietnamese film The Girl from Yesterday. British producers backing Blue Season handed her unusual creative freedom: beyond the basic six-episode format, investors let the team shape the scripts and characters as they saw fit.
What makes the series stand out is its cultural spine. The plot kicks off with the murder of a Vietnamese woman, pulling the detectives deep into London's immigrant communities. Nguyen has spoken openly about her frustration with how Western film and TV have long pushed Asian actors into bit parts — nail salon workers, service staff, gang members. Her answer was to build the story around Vietnamese lives and cast actors of genuine Vietnamese heritage rather than pan-Asian performers reciting phonetic lines. That commitment slowed casting down considerably, since actors of Vietnamese descent are still rare in British industry, but the team ran extended casting calls, multiple audition rounds and chemistry tests to get it right.
The shoot itself was a logistics masterclass. Principal photography wrapped in just 14 working days under UK rules capping shoots at 11 hours a day with a mandatory hour's rest — a tight window given the number of locations in the script. When a last-minute problem hit the final episode, the crew couldn't afford a new location, so they redressed the existing set with new props, decor and camera angles to fake a different space entirely. Cast members, including Kate Cook as Detective Ann Garland and Earl Wan as Mackie Wong, credit Nguyen's calm, methodical prep for keeping the production on track; the show also used a dedicated intimacy coordinator and structured protocols for sensitive scenes.
The results have travelled well. Before its Vietnamese release, Blue Season reached the finalist stage in the diversity, inclusion and equality category at the Global Production Awards, held by Screen International during the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, and it currently scores 8.6/10 on IMDb. Fair warning for hardcore procedural fans: the compressed runtime means some clues get resolved abruptly.
Why should travellers care? Because film and TV have become one of the best lenses on a city's hidden layers, and Blue Season spots a light on London neighbourhoods most visitors never see — Vietnamese cafés, family tensions, generational divides. Fans of the series could easily build an East London and Kingsland Road Vietnamese-food crawl around it, pairing screen fiction with the real immigrant stories behind the city's best phở.
