First broadcast in 1996, Silent Witness is a long-running British television thriller series, now in its 12th season. The series was created by Nigel McCrery, a former murder squad detective in Nottingham, and was based on Prof. Helen Witwell, a forensic pathologist based in Sheffield who had previously worked with him.
The programme originally followed the activities of a female pathologist, Dr Sam Ryan (played by Amanda Burton), who was later (2002) replaced by Dr Leo Dalton (William Gaminara) and Dr Harry Cunningham (Tom Ward). A new character, Dr Nikki Alexander (Emilia Fox), was introduced to the team in 2004.
The show follows the fortunes of the pathologists as they are called on by police to help identify murder victims that have been too badly burned or decomposed to use standard identification methods. Together the team delve deep into a variety of mysterious and suspicious deaths, unravelling the clues that will find the killers.
The series has constantly got excellent viewing figures, both in the UK and in the US (where it is broadcast on the BBC America Channel).

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EPISODE SYNOPSIS (SPOILERS!)
Episode 1: The team is called in to identify the corpse of a woman whose face was surgically removed after death. Janet Mander (Jaye Griffiths), a Home Office anthropologist, cannot link it to similar murders but, after Nikki (Emilia Fox) has reconstructed the face, Holly Farr (Naomi Bentley), a medical student on work experience with Harry (Tom Ward),recognizes the woman as Fran Price (Charlotte Weston), an investigative journalist. Pargeter (Phil Davis), her agent, is evasive and Supt. Barker (Neil Dudgeon), the investigating police officer, does not help as he is obsessed with the idea that Leonid Polyak (Philip Quast), a Russian criminal Fran helped to put behind bars, has ordered a hit on her from his prison cell. Whilst Leo (William Gaminara) gets closer to Janet, Harry is concerned when he sees Barker entering Holly's flat and later she is found murdered in her bed.

Episode 2: Following Holly's murder the team are assigned individual bodyguards and Harry's minder, Frank (John Kirk), is extremely useful in a car chase. The two work as a team and, through Pargeter, meet Oleg Kovik (Richard Attlee), a Russian oligarch anxious to become a British national and who tells Harry that Fran was a dear friend. (She also had a face-lift in Russia, and the removal of her face has followed the lines of the operation.) Harry takes a dislike to Kovik, who tries to bribe him by putting money in his bank account. Between them Frank and Harry discover a disc hidden by Fran that was meant to be in her forthcoming book. It reveals that Kovik and Polyak were bitter enemies and Kovik used her to frame Polyak, making it necessary for her to die too. Holly was killed as a warning. Janet uses her influence at the Home Office to have Kovik's British citizenship denied and he is charged with the murders
and arrested. Barker later tells Harry that Holly did sleep with him but that she was an opportunist using the case to gain fame and publicity for herself and that the killers recognized her because she was anxious to appear in front of a television camera. Harry still imagines that he sees her when he is out jogging.

(Source: IMDB. Screencap courtesy of R.)