Filmmaker Veena Sud’s name is synonymous with dark and moody television – which is precisely what made her such a great fit for Quibi’s The Stranger. The thriller series begins ominously – Maika Monroe plays a driver for a rideshare company who has only just moved to Los Angeles and goes to pick up an odd man at a fancy house. The man, played by Dane DeHaan, is charming enough on the drive until he reveals to Monroe’s character that he’s actually a psychotic killer. And that’s all in the first episode.

Creating tension onscreen is easier said than done, and Sud has a lot of experience grappling with dark themes on television in a way that’s effective and dynamic. Below, we take a closer look at the dark TV worlds of Veena Sud, the threads that connect them, and why they culminate in The Stranger.

Cold Case

One of Sud’s first major gigs in Hollywood was as a writer on the CBS procedural thriller series Cold Case. After three seasons as a writer, she was promoted to an executive producer – a role she remained in for the fourth and fifth seasons.

Cold Case first premiered in 2003 and the TV landscape was very different from what it is now. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation had just launched three years earlier and was a massive hit, creating a hunger for gritty and grisly crime procedurals with a new case each week. Set in Philadelphia, the show starred Kathryn Morris as a homicide detective who specializes in cold cases. Over the course of the show’s run, each episode would tackle a different cold case – an unsolved murder – from some time in the past.

This show saw Sud honing her skills as a television writer while delving into dark and grisly crimes. One episode she wrote, “Thrill Kill,” was a riff on the West Memphis Three and focused on the murder of three young boys. Another, “Rampage,” focused on a mass shooting. This is dark subject matter for network television, and of course the tone couldn’t be too over the line (the bad guy never won), but Cold Case definitely feels like an early “baby step” to the even darker and more dramatic storytelling she would tackle later.

The Killing

After working on a CBS procedural for a few years, Sud was hired to develop a new TV series for burgeoning network AMC, which had just launched Breaking Bad and Mad Men and was looking to expand its slate. Sud was tasked with adapting the Danish TV series Forbrydelsen, and the American version became The Killing. Right off the bat this show was dark, moody and foreboding – but more terrifying than anything Sud had done on Cold Case. With the constraints of traditional network television behind her, she was free to let The Killing dig deep into its murder mystery story and the haunting effect it had on its characters.

The Killing’s first season kicked off with the murder of a local teenager, which triggered an investigation by homicide detective Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) and rookie detective Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman). The show was a delicious blend of mystery, political intrigue, and character drama, with Sud taking what she learned on Cold Case and expanding one crime into a full season of television. The backdrop of Seattle, Washington underlined the dreary moods of the show’s various characters, as Sud crafted what remains one of her darkest pieces ever.

The show ran for four seasons and tackled three different mysteries, each sinister and twisted in its own way. What sets The Killing apart from Sud’s other work is how deeply it delved into the entire world of the show – it was a murder mystery first and foremost, but Sud’s world building in crafting a living breathing city surrounding the murder was terrific. The environment is vitally important to the success of any thriller – offering some sense of tangibility makes the proceedings that much more intense. Sud really honed that skill on The Killing, creating a series out of a world that seemed to have more dark corners and back alleys than you could count.

Seven Seconds

After The Killing wrapped up, Sud’s next show combined the world building and multiple POVs of the AMC series with a socially conscious and topical story. Netflix’s Seven Seconds kicks into gear when a white police officer accidentally runs over and critically injures a young black boy, leaving him for dead after his fellow officers enact a cover-up. The kid’s eventual death spurs a hunt for his killer alongside protests, as his mother (played by Regina King in an Emmy-winning performance) attempts to figure out what happened.

While it only ran for one season, Seven Seconds takes the approach from The Killing – a murder triggers an investigation and multiple POVs reveal how everyone’s dealing with the fallout – and makes a couple significant changes. For one, you know immediately who the killer is. And for that reason, the show is more concerned with the darkness not just of the murder itself, but the cover-up by the police and the ongoing racial injustices that plague the city and America at large. So it’s taking all the dramatic character-driven aspects of The Killing and applying that to a much larger social issue, adding deeper thematic resonance and in some ways resulting in an even darker story. Seven Seconds is less of a murder mystery and more of a character drama, but that doesn’t make it any less unsettling.

The Stranger

Sud’s latest project puts her in the director’s chair on TV for the first time since a Season 2 episode of The Killing, and also takes her out of her comfort zone. Quibi’s The Stranger is no murder mystery – we know who did it. But it’s also not a sprawling, world-building, multiple POV ensemble – it revolves mainly around two characters and takes place over the course of 12 hours as a young woman is besieged by threats and violence from an obsessive, murderous creep.

Sud wrote, produced, and directed all 13 episodes of The Stranger, and proves incredibly capable behind the camera of building and holding tension, evoking terror, and digging into the interior lives of her characters. It’s a culmination of sorts, pulling from her experiences on Cold Case, The Killing, and Seven Seconds to craft a compelling mystery that’s also character-focused and also incredibly relevant with themes of toxic masculinity and the dark side of social media. It’s creepy and thrilling, but its story and characters linger after each “quick bite” episode. And it makes us eager to see what Sud’s going to do next.

All episodes of The Stranger are available to watch on Quibi right now.

This article is presented by Quibi.