Culture | TV It aims to give you nightmares, but Paramount+’s Insomnia is more soporific than anything else. This six part adaptation of Sarah Pinborough’s novel of the same name begins with a promising premise. Married and successful mother-of-two Emma ( Vicky McClure ) is approaching her 40th birthday when she stops sleeping and becomes prone to spacing out and forgetting things.

More worryingly, she realises she has also started a nightly ritual of frantically chanting and scribbling numbers, lighting candles and wading out into the family’s pond. Perfectly normal stuff. It’s behaviour she seems unconscious of and it is disturbingly similar to that of her own mother Patricia (Corinna Marlowe), who had a psychotic breakdown at the age of 40.

Just to ram the point home, Patricia tells Emma, in a flashback, that she has “bad blood”. Not the fun, Taylor Swift variety either, as Emma and her sister end up being taken into care. To make things worse, the series kicks off with Emma getting news that the same mother is on her deathbed – and at the hospital, she is reunited with her older sister Phoebe (Leanne Best).

It’s clear there are decades of issues to unpack here. Meanwhile, Emma’s unravelling state is putting promotion at her legal firm at risk and heaping further strain on her marriage to Robert (Tom Cullen). Add in to that is some teenage rebellion served from her daughter Chloe (India Fowler) who has a mysterious new “friend” that she won’t tell h.