He’s swapping Doc Martin for much darker territory in a hard-hitting drug dealing drama.

ITV has announced a new six-part thriller to tackle the subject of county lines drug dealing. Out There will star Martin Clunes as a farmer forced to confront the dark forces seeping into his rural community when his livelihood, homestead and family life are threatened by local county lines drugs dealers.

The criminals use the British countryside as a field of operations, moving drugs and money between their inner-city hubs and provincial areas.

Here’s the synopsis for Out There:

Martin Clunes plays Nathan Williams, a man who runs a farm which has been in his family for generations, caught in a numbing rhythm of work and grief following the death of his wife, Sabine, two years previously.  A single parent to teenager Johnny, played by Louis Ashbourne Serkis, Nathan is uniquely placed and possesses enough pent-up energy to take on the gangs that threaten to engulf his son.

Consequently, he embarks on a personal journey that will take him ever further out of his comfort zone into a dark alternative world as he fights to protect his family, his homestead and his legacy. He’s missed all the clues that the country idyll around him has been fatally compromised, contaminated by waves of criminality spreading and mutating virus-like from the city.

Now Nathan must accept that the rustic atmosphere of his childhood is long gone, replaced by something altogether more edgy and perilous. And the only way for Nathan, our hero, to survive in this brave new world is to learn the rules and fight back…

Also in the cast are Mark Lewis Jones, Natalia Kostrzewa, Carly-Sophia Davies and Gerran Howell as Rhys.

Out There reunites the team of writer Ed Whitmore and director Marc Evans, who worked together with Clunes on Manhunt. The series comes from Buffalo Pictures and is produced by Philippa Braithwaite (Doc Martin) and Evie Bergson-Korn. The directors are Marc Evans and Pippa Langdale.

Martin Clunes said:

“I’m very happy to be working with Marc Evans and Ed Whitmore again after the success of Manhunt. Out There couldn’t be more different from Doc Martin. It’s pretty dark, but definitely a story worth telling.”

Writer and Executive Producer Ed Whitmore said:

“County lines is a particularly vicious and ruthless wave of drug dealing that uses fear and violence to coerce, often vulnerable, young people into working as runners and dealers. It has become a serious and rapidly increasing problem across the whole of the UK, so it felt like an important and timely story to tell.”

“I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of things being hidden in plain sight and the way in which different social worlds can co-exist cheek-by-jowl until, one day, they collide.  The fundamental premise of Out There – a widowed farmer who discovers that his son has fallen foul of county lines – immediately spoke to me as a story I wanted to tell.”

The show is currently filming in Wales and is being produced in association with Creative Wales. It will air on ITV and ITVX.

We’ll keep you posted.