Troy Kennedy Martin began his career as a television screenwriter in 1958 and quickly emerged as a leading member of a group of writers, directors, and producers at the BBC who were pushing the limits of British television drama. In addition to writing episodes of crime series, literary adaptations, and original miniseries, Kennedy Martin became an outspoken proponent of a new approach to television drama that would exploit what he saw as the properties of the medium.

     He first received widespread acclaim for his approach with the BBC police series Z Cars, which proved enormously popular and ran from 1962 to 1978. The series was acclaimed for the fast pace and gritty realism with which it depicted a Lancashire police force coping with the problems of a modern housing estate. Its view of the police offered a sharp contrast to the homespun philosophy of PC Dixon in the BBC's Dixon of Dock Green, which had been extremely popular with family audiences since its debut in 1955. Kennedy Martin wrote the first eight episodes of the first season of Z Cars, plus the final episode in 1978.

     In 1964 he published an article in the theater magazine Encore in which he argued forcefully for a "new television drama." Through its attack on "naturalism," this article set the terms for a lively, if sometimes confusing, debate on realism in television drama that persists into the present. Kennedy Martin advocated using the camera to do more than just show talking heads, by freeing the dramatic structure from the limits of real time and creating more complex relations between sound and image. In particular, he wanted to exploit what he called "the total objectivity of the television camera," which gave the medium a built-in Brechtian critical dimension that worked against subjective identification with characters. 

     From Kennedy Martin's point of view, the value of Z Cars lay in its respect for reality: its refusal to idealize the police and its attempt to reveal the underlying social causes that led to crime. Yet, because the style remained "naturalistic," Kennedy Martin felt that it was soon compromised by the generic and institutional constraints that encourage identification with the police and the demonization of the criminal.

     Despite his disappointment with Z Cars, Kennedy Martin continued to write within popular crime and action genres, notably for Thames Television's police series The Sweeney (1975-78), for which he wrote six episodes. He also wrote screenplays for several action films, with the same sense of frustration that his critical intentions were subverted in the production process. The Italian Job (1969), directed by Peter Collinson, was Kennedy Martin's most successful film screenplay.

     Some of the formal innovations that Kennedy Martin called for in his manifesto were incorporated into Diary of a Young Man, a six-part serial broadcast by the BBC in 1964, written by Kennedy Martin and John McGrath and directed by Ken Loach. Other writers, notably David Mercer and Dennis Potter, also explored the possibilities of a non-naturalistic television drama. Yet it was not until the 1980s that Kennedy Martin was able to produce work that fulfilled both his critical and formalist goals. First came a fairly free adaptation of Angus Wilson's The Old Men at the Zoo as a five-part serial, broadcast by the BBC in 1983, a powerful and disturbing science fiction parable about a political order whose logic leads to the destruction of Britain in a nuclear war.

     Fears of nuclear power and government bureaucracy also drove Kennedy Martin's major achievement, Edge of Darkness, a political thriller broadcast in six parts on BBC 2 in late 1985 and promptly repeated in three parts on consecutive nights on BBC 1. This serial combined the "naturalistic" tradition of British television drama on social issues with a popular thriller format and elements of fantasy and myth. A police inspector, investigating the murder of his daughter, discovers that she belonged to an anti-nuclear organization that had uncovered an illegal nuclear experiment backed by the government. The break with naturalism occurs when the murdered woman simply appears beside her father and starts a conversation with him, linking his investigation to the fusion of myth and science in the ecological movement to which she had belonged.

     The popularity of political thrillers on British televi­sion after 1985 confirmed the significance of Edge of Darkness as a key work of the decade. Although Kennedy Martin advocated the development of short dramatic forms, not unlike the music videos that emerged in the 1980s, he has made a major contribution to British television drama in the developments of the long forms of series and serials.