Hugh Bonneville is back as Ian Fletcher in Twenty Twenty Six, a new six-part series that drops him into Miami and sets him against the biggest sporting event the world has ever seen. He plays the director of integrity with a straight face, and that deadpan calm is still doing a lot of the work.
The timing is the point. Twenty Twenty Six arrives as viewers are already looking ahead to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, and the series leans into that future tournament for its satire, even if the references to FIFA, its president and shadowy regulations are bleeped for legal reasons. David Tennant returns with the sardonic voiceover, setting the tone with the sort of clipped fatalism that has long been part of the character’s world.
Bonneville’s Fletcher is the same anxious operator familiar from Twenty Twelve, where he was the head of deliverance at the London Olympics in 2012, and from W1A, where he later turned up as head of values at the. John Morton created the character, after earlier work on People Like Us, and the new series keeps that lineage alive by sending him into another bureaucratic maze dressed up as a global spectacle.
That is also where the series starts to feel stretched. The newer cast is mostly unknown, which leaves Bonneville carrying much of the comic load, and the familiar mockumentary rhythm can feel less nimble than it once did. Some of the race and age stereotypes are more likely to draw a sharp intake of breath than a laugh, and a few of the jokes, including a gag about condoms for players, land closer to discomfort than bite. The setup still has energy, but the concept is beginning to strain under the weight of its own returning formula.
Even so, the series keeps finding ways to puncture its own pomp. Gabriella, a hot-headed Mexican vice president of optics and narrative, collides with a short-fused New York lawyer in business affairs; a Teflon-coated Belgian attaché is busy back-channelling intelligence to FIFA; an earnest American oversees sustainability while nursing a serious crush on Fletcher; and a Canadian logistics expert refuses to take a position on anything. There is also a gaggle of clownish Gen Z social media staff, Will Humphries returns as an inept intern, and an official football with an embedded chip sends conspiracy theorists into overdrive. The show even has a US president named Trump in the mix, which gives the whole enterprise a more pointed, and sometimes more absurd, edge.
What still anchors it is Bonneville’s performance. The review’s clearest judgment is that his Fletcher remains as fresh and endearing as ever, which matters because the rest of the machinery only works if the central figure keeps moving through it with enough grace to make the chaos look accidental. The unanswered question is whether that performance can keep the format afloat through all six episodes, or whether the joke is now being asked to do more than it comfortably can.
