The following contains spoilers for A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story. now streaming on BritBox.

BritBox's A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story wants to add to British television's long history of great crime dramas. It's halfway there, with a cast whom fans will know -- even if they don't recognize the actors right away in the 1950s setting. But the script for the four-episode miniseries isn't intriguing enough to make viewers care about Ruth's predicament, beyond the terrible way in which she was executed.

As the title indicates, Ruth was the victim of abuse at the hands of her boyfriend David Blakely. She becomes the police's prime suspect when David ends up dead. The miniseries features great performances by Lucy Boynton as Ruth and Toby Jones as her beleaguered solicitor John Bickford. But it doesn't separate itself enough from countless other true crime stories, or stories about women who have been wronged.