Guilt on Masterpiece

Sunday Sept. 5 and 12 at 8 p.m.

“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up” goes the old saying. But that didn’t stop brothers Max and Jake, who hit an elderly pedestrian during an inebriated drive home from a wedding.

Mark Bonnar (“Unforgotten”) and Jamie Sives (“To the Ends of the Earth”) star as Max and Jake in a darkly absorbing tale of rascality and deceit in “Guilt,” a four-part “Masterpiece” series airing with back-to-back episodes on Sept. 5 and 12.

Hit-and-run perpetrators usually leave the body at the scene, but Max and Jake carry Walter’s corpse to his house nearby and set him up in an easy chair. There, they find a letter revealing that Walter had terminal cancer. “He was dying slowly. We just made it quick,” says Max with relief. “He’d probably thank us.” The pair even attend Walter’s wake to retrieve incriminating evidence – but when Jake hits it off with Walter’s niece, Max’s plan to escape justice gets even more complicated.

Although the brothers are no longer close, they are now co-conspirators in a crime that grows in severity as they dig a deeper and deeper pit of evasions and desperate stratagems.