A gifted 31-year-old poet faces eviction, poverty, and a complicated family legacy as she fights to become the UK's first Black Poet Laureate — one improvised, life-changing poem at a time.

SYNOPSIS:

RHAPSODIST is the story of Lexi Arthur, a brilliant 31-year-old Black poet with less than two pennies to rub together and a dream of Poet Laureateship. Currently stuck in a dead-end bakery job at Kwik Save, Lexi's only shot at literary success — and financial freedom — lies in winning the National Poetry Slam, which offers £100,000 and a publishing deal.

In the pilot, Lexi's chaotic morning unravels fast: she loses her job defending a colleague's non-verbal five-year-old son, returns home to an eviction notice she's clearly been ignoring, and is unable to finish the final line of her Quarter Finals poem. Then her straight-talking sister, BB, arrives at the door with news that upturns everything: their mother, Afia, has collapsed and been rushed to hospital.

At the hospital, Lexi and BB learn that Afia — a fiercely pragmatic Ghanaian-British statistician, who has spent decades quietly discouraging Lexi's ambitions — has suffered an ischemic stroke. The cruellest irony: she has lost her voice.

Sent to retrieve Afia's will from her flat, Lexi instead uncovers something explosive — a hidden notebook filled with Afia's own poetry. Raw, brilliant, and dangerous, written before Lexi was born... One poem, entitled "Love Like Theirs" — which shares the exact title of Lexi's own competition piece — dismantles the myth of Romeo and Juliet with devastating precision, and ends with a whispered confession: that Afia's poet husband stole her words and published them as his own. She silenced herself to raise her children.

The discovery reframes everything Lexi thought she knew about her mother's opposition to her dreams: Afia wasn't anti-poetry — she was protecting Lexi from her unhealed wound.

With Afia sedated following a second stroke, Lexi faces an impossible choice – stay at Afia’s bedside in her darkest hour, or leave her to compete in the competition. Clutching her mother's notebook like a talisman, she takes the stage and improvises —part requiem, part love letter — speaking her mother's silenced story aloud for the first time.

Before the results, she leaves the theatre, and races back to the hospital. When Afia wakes to find her old notebook returned to her hands, mother and daughter reach — haltingly, tenderly — toward healing what had long been broken. A text from the Slam organiser arrives on Lexi's phone, but we fade to black before we know the competition results, with a feeling that something more important has already been won.

Unapologetically feminist, raw, and darkly funny; character-driven, issue-focused, and with a tight ensemble, the Rhapsodist series takes us on an odyssey through the greatest poets— African, British, classical, underground, and everything in between.