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How would you do if that wildest friend from your youth got back in touch? Imagine if you were battling a terminal illness and felt completely unburdened? Consider if you felt guilty for getting your friend imprisoned a decade back? If you were the one she landed in the clink and you were only being released to die of cancer in her custody? What if you had been a almost unstoppable pair of scam artists who still had a stash of disguises left over from your glory days and a longing to feel some excitement again?

All this and more are the questions that Frauds, a new drama featuring Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker, presents to viewers on a exhilarating, intense six-part ride that traces two female fraudsters bent on executing a final scheme. Echoing an earlier work, Jones developed this series with a writing partner, and it retains similar qualities. Much like a suspense-driven structure served as a backdrop to the psychodramas slowly revealed, here the grand heist the protagonist Roberta (Bert) has meticulously arranged while incarcerated after learning her prognosis is the vehicle for an exploration of companionship, deceit, and affection in all its forms.

Bert is placed under the supervision of Sam (Whittaker), who resides close by in the Andalucían hills. Guilt stopped her from ever visiting Bert, but she has stayed close and avoided scams without her – “Bit crass with you in prison for a job I botched.” And to prepare for Bert’s, albeit short, life on the outside, she has purchased numerous undergarments, because there are many ways for female friends to show repentance and one is the acquisition of “a big lady-bra” following ten years of uncomfortable institutional clothing.

Sam aims to continue maintaining her peaceful existence and look after Bert till the end. Bert possesses different plans. And if your most impulsive companion has other ideas – well, those tend to be the ones you follow. Their old dynamic gradually reasserts itself and her strategies are underway by the time she reveals the complete plan for the heist. The series experiments with chronology – to good rather than eye-rolling effect – to give us the set-pieces first and then the explanations. So we watch the pair slipping jewellery and watches from affluent attendees at a memorial service – and acquiring a gilded religious artifact because why wouldn’t you if you could? – before removing their hairpieces and turning their mourning clothes inside out to become colourful suits as they stride out and down the church steps, filled with excitement and assets.

They require the stolen goods to finance the operation. This entails recruiting a forger (with, unbeknown to them, a betting addiction that is likely to draw unwanted attention) in the form of magician’s assistant Jackie (Elizabeth Berrington), who possesses the necessary skills to help them remove and replace the target painting (a renowned Dali painting at a prominent gallery). They also enlist art enthusiast Celine (Kate Fleetwood), who focuses on works by artists depicting female subjects. She is equally merciless as all the criminals the forger and their funeral robbery are drawing towards them, including – most dangerously – their former leader Miss Take (Talisa Garcia), a contemporary crime lord who had them running scams for her from their teens. She did not take well to the pair’s assertion of themselves as self-reliant tricksters so unresolved issues remain there.

Unexpected developments are interspersed with progressively uncovered truths about Bert and Sam’s history, so you get all the satisfactions of a Thomas Crown Affair-ish caper – carried out with immense energy and praiseworthy readiness to overlook obvious implausibilities – plus a captivatingly detailed portrait of a bond that is potentially as harmful as her illness but equally difficult to eradicate. Jones gives perhaps her finest and multifaceted portrayal yet, as the wounded, bitter Bert with her endless quest for thrills to distract from her internal anguish that has nothing to do with her medical condition. Whittaker stands with her, delivering excellent acting in a slightly less interesting part, and alongside the writers they craft a fantastically stylish, emotionally rich and highly insightful piece of entertainment that is feminist to its bones without preaching and in every way a triumph. Eagerly awaiting future installments.