Jim Field Smith shuts people in a room, or an aeroplane, and watches what pressure does to them. For half of Hijack it holds and he is a fine television director. When the story goes to the ground, the tension goes with it.
Fi1m perspective
Idris Elba in business class, the guns out, and a man deciding that a cabin full of frightened passengers is a deal like any other. That is where Hijack (2023) begins, and it is the Jim Field Smith situation in one frame: people shut in somewhere they cannot leave, and a camera that stays with them to see who cracks. Field Smith created the series with George Kay, wrote on it and directed it, and the clock is the whole design. Seven episodes, a seven-hour flight from Dubai to London, one hour each.
He did not start in thrillers. He began in sketch comedy and radio, moved through shorts and commercials, and made two studio comedies, She's Out of My League (2010) and Butter (2012), the second of them taken to task at the time for satire laid on too thick. Television suited him better. Episodes (2012), The Wrong Mans (2013–2014) and Stag (2016) let him put jokes and jeopardy in the same scene, and that comic timing has never left his work; the frightened people in his dramas still get the odd funny line, and it steadies them. Then came Idiotlamp, the company he founded with Kay, and a run of Criminal (2019–2020), Truth Seekers (2020), Litvinenko (2022) and Hijack.
Criminal is the key to him. A police interview room, a suspect, a detective, and nothing else, so that the crime itself plays out in the viewer's head rather than on screen. He has called Hijack 'Criminal with wings', and that is exactly right. He shoots plainly, without flourishes, and lets the pressure do its work on faces: David Tennant across a table in Criminal and again in Litvinenko, Elba in an aisle. Some critics found the interview room stagey rather than tense. We have more time for the method than that, on one condition.
The condition is that he stays in the box. For the first three and a half hours of Hijack we were as tense as we have been in front of a television in a long while, because nobody on that plane knew more than we did and the hour on screen was the hour on our wall. Then the series goes to the ground, and the ground is ordinary television, and the last two episodes ask us to believe things we could not. Every time Field Smith cuts away from the people under pressure to the people managing it, the air goes out.
A second season of Hijack arrived in January 2026, and the reviews so far call it more dour and less tight than the first. We would not be surprised. The confined space is his gift. The hard part is finding a reason, each time, not to open the door.
Biography
Jim Field Smith is a British film and television director, writer and producer. Born on 20 February 1979 in England, he was educated at Wellington College and the University of Birmingham. He began his career in sketch comedy as a member of the troupe Dutch Elm Conservatoire before directing short films and commercials.
Smith made his feature directorial debut with the romantic comedy She's Out of My League (2010) and followed it with the satire Butter (2012). On television he has directed episodes of Episodes (2011–2012) and co-created, produced and directed the BBC series The Wrong Mans (2013–2014) and Stag (2016). He co-founded the production company Idiotlamp with writer George Kay.
With Kay he created the Netflix series Criminal: UK (2019–2020) and the Apple TV+ thriller Hijack (2023), on which he also served as director and writer. His other directing credits include Truth Seekers (2020) and Litvinenko (2022). He has received BAFTA, Emmy and Golden Globe nominations.
