Fallen ITVX Review: Why Lauren Kate’s Cursed Romance Lands in the UK at Last
ITVX dropped all eight episodes of Fallen as a box set on Sunday 3 May 2026, and for UK viewers who first met Lauren Kate’s cursed-angel saga as paperbacks passed around school bus seats, this Fallen ITVX review has been a long time coming. The 2016 film adaptation came and went without a proper UK theatrical release. The novels, four in the main sequence and a prequel, sold strongly to British teenagers but never quite produced the on-screen version their fanbase had pictured. A decade on, with the genre’s centre of gravity shifted from cinema to streaming, ITVX has given the property a second life, picking up the International Emmy-winning series originally produced for Brazil’s Globoplay.
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Fallen ITVX Review: What ITVX Has Actually Bought
It is worth being precise about what this is. ITVX has not commissioned a new Fallen. The eight-episode first season was made by London-based Silver Reel in co-production with Germany’s Night Train Media, originally for Globoplay, where it launched in August 2024. It is an English-language production, shot for an international audience from the start, with a largely European cast and a director, Matt Hastings, whose CV runs from Shadowhunters to The Handmaid’s Tale. ITVX has acquired UK rights and packaged it as a Sunday-night box-set drop, which is the right call. Fallen is the kind of show that benefits from being binged in a single weekend rather than spaced out across a midweek schedule.
The show won Best Kids: Live-Action at the 2025 International Emmys, which is part of why ITV’s acquisitions team will have moved on it. That award is also a useful signal of where the series sits. This is not a peak-prestige drama dressed in fantasy clothing. It is a YA supernatural romance made with care and budget, aimed squarely at the audience that grew up on The Vampire Diaries and now wants something with a similar heartbeat but slightly more adult edges.
The Premise, For Anyone Who Skipped the Books
Lucinda “Luce” Price is sent to Sword and Cross, a sinisterly named reform school for troubled teenagers, after a fire she cannot remember kills a boy she barely knew. Once there, she meets Daniel Grigori, a beautiful, infuriating older student she is convinced she has met before, and Cam, the charismatic rival who notices her instantly. The puzzle of why Luce keeps seeing shadows, why Daniel reacts to her with such studied indifference, and what Sword and Cross actually is, drives the season. Anyone who has read book one knows the reveal involves fallen angels, a centuries-long curse and a love that keeps killing the heroine. Anyone who has not is left to discover it at the show’s pace, which is patient but not punishing.
The Cast: A UK-Friendly Roster With Real Range
Jessica Alexander, last seen as Vanessa in Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid, plays Luce. She is the right age for the role, which already sets the production a notch above the 2016 film, and she carries the central problem of the part well: Luce has to be smart, watchful and freshly bewildered without becoming passive. Gijs Blom, the Dutch actor known internationally from The Crown, plays Daniel, the angel of the title in everything but explicit name for most of episode one. He gets the brooding right, but also has the lighter scenes that the books rarely afforded the character.
The supporting bench is where UK viewers will feel most at home. Sarah Niles, who many will recognise from Ted Lasso, plays Ms Miriam, one of the school’s authority figures, with a calmly unreadable presence that anchors the early episodes. Alexander Siddig, a quietly brilliant export from Game of Thrones and, before that, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, plays Dr Howson; he gets less to do than you would want, but elevates every scene he is in. Timothy Innes, of The Last Kingdom, plays Cam, with a charm that does not coast on dimples alone. Josefine Koenig, Lawrence Walker and Esme Kingdom round out a believable student ensemble. The chemistry across the cast is the season’s quiet strength.
How It Differs From the 2016 Film
Comparison is unavoidable. Scott Hicks’s 2016 feature compressed book one into 90 minutes and lost most of what made it work. The series has the room the film never did. Sword and Cross actually feels like a place. Friendships develop. The romance is allowed to be slow and irritating in the way the books made it, rather than rushed into inevitability. The expanded length also lets the show do something the film could not: give the supporting students, particularly Penn and Arriane, full subplots. Penn’s arc in episodes three and four is one of the season’s better surprises and lands harder than anything in the original adaptation.
Visually, the series leans gothic without falling into Halloween-shop pastiche. Sword and Cross is shot in muted greys and bruised greens, with strong production design from a team clearly briefed to make the school feel both real and slightly wrong. The angels themselves, when they finally appear in their full form, are handled with restraint that was beyond the 2016 film’s effects budget.
Why ITVX Picked This Up Now
ITVX has been quietly building a YA-leaning sub-section of its catalogue for two years, and Fallen fits a strategic gap. Netflix’s UK numbers for Wednesday and Prime Video’s for The Wheel of Time and The Summer I Turned Pretty have proved that British teenagers and twenty-somethings will pay attention to gothic-flavoured romance if it is cast and shot well. ITVX, free at the point of use with ads, has an obvious incentive to be the place those viewers find their next obsession. The Globoplay origin actually helps; Brazilian co-productions have become some of the most ambitious YA work in television, with budgets that European public-service broadcasters cannot consistently match. Coverage from The Guardian’s TV and radio desk has noted a wider trend of UK platforms acquiring international YA content rather than commissioning it from scratch, and Fallen is a textbook example.
Where the Show Stumbles
It is not flawless. The first two episodes spend a little too long withholding information that almost any viewer with a passing knowledge of the source material has already worked out. The pacing tightens once the central reveal lands in episode four, but a slightly braver edit could have got us there sooner. The dialogue occasionally tips into the on-the-nose, particularly in scenes where the show needs to seed its mythology. And one or two of the visual-effects beats in episode seven look noticeably softer than the rest of the season, which is a familiar streaming-era problem when post-production work is stretched across eight hours.
Most of these are forgivable. None of them are the kind of structural problems that sink a YA romance. The bigger question, for British viewers, is whether the cast can get through the inevitable mid-season speed bumps without losing the chemistry that carries the early hours. On the evidence of episodes one to four, they can.
How It Sits Within UK TV Drama Right Now
One of the more interesting things about Fallen arriving on ITVX in May 2026 is the contrast it draws with the rest of the British drama conversation. As we have argued elsewhere on Lifestyle Reviewer, UK drama has been steadily compressing into shorter, denser six-episode seasons. Fallen is an eight-episode season made for international audiences, with a runtime closer to American YA streaming than to a typical Sunday-night BBC One commission. For viewers used to the slate currently available on BBC iPlayer, it is a deliberate change of register: bigger world, longer runway, a willingness to indulge the romantic plot rather than treat it as decoration around a thriller engine. That is not better or worse, just different, and ITVX is right to treat it as a complement rather than a competitor to its serious-drama line-up.
It also lands in a week when British TV is paying attention to itself. With the BAFTA TV Awards 2026 a week away and the conversation around prestige drama dominated by Adolescence and A Thousand Blows, there is something quietly useful about a show that just wants to be a romantic fantasy and does it competently. Not everything has to be a state-of-the-nation address. Radio Times’ ITVX hub has been flagging genre acquisitions like this as part of a broader rebalancing of the platform’s offer, and on early evidence it is working.
Should UK Viewers Click Play?
If you read the books, this is the adaptation you have actually been waiting for. The casting is right, the pacing is closer to the source, and the production has the budget to make Sword and Cross look like the place you imagined. If you did not read the books but liked Wednesday, the early seasons of The Vampire Diaries or the more recent run of British supernatural offerings, the season is a comfortable weekend binge with enough mythology to reward attention.
If you have no patience for YA tropes, gothic boarding schools or love triangles where one corner has wings, this will not convert you. Fallen is not pretending to be anything else, and it is better for it.
What does this say about where ITVX is heading in 2026, and is there room for a homegrown UK answer to the international YA romance, or has Britain already ceded that ground to co-productions like this one?
Read the books when I was 14, far too embarrassed to admit how excited I am for this. Does the show fix the bits the film got wrong, particularly Cam? Worth waiting through the slower opening episode?