One Child, TV review: Worthier than 10 years of New Yorker articles condensed into a script

British TV veteran Guy Hibbert took on a daunting range of issues in the first of three episodes, screened as part of the BBC's China season

China crisis: Katie Leung and Sebastian So in One Child (Ed Miller/BBC)

Not many screenwriters walk so comfortably in such challenging territory as Guy Hibbert. You don't dramatise subjects as full-on as the Siege of Sarajevo, identity disorder, the Omagh bombing, murder, ricin attacks, drone warfare and the Troubles without, one hopes, off-screen outlets for lighter pursuits – or a good therapist.

In One Child, the British TV veteran pointed his pen and fondness for political drama to China, taking on, in one story, a daunting range of issues: capital punishment, corruption, globalisation, race and the recently ditched one-child policy.

In the first of three episodes, screened as part of the BBC's China season, we met Mei (Katie Leung, of Harry Potter snog fame), a smart student adopted as a baby by cartoonishly middle-class liberal academic types, whose lifelong safe space was shattered when her birth mother made contact via a brave journalist in Guangzhou.

Mei's younger brother (the boy her parents sought when they left her at an orphanage) had been sentenced to death for the murder of a Nigerian businessman that he only witnessed. Sure enough, the real killer is the playboy son of a wealthy factory owner. A reluctant, confused Mei travelled to the megacity to meet her mother, a factory worker, and hear her pleas for help.

It was a decent sell – sheltered Westerner discovers her identity and the meaning of family in a strange, hostile forest of high-rises and low morals. But between the dramatic sequences, when Mei realises she has to act, the plotting and acting felt at times too worthy, too much like 10 years of New Yorker articles condensed into a script, for the plot to breathe by itself. It was all very informative but if Hibbert's best work coats the topics he admirably tackles in drama of universal appeal, One Child didn't slip down so easily.