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What could you respond if your most reckless companion from your teenage years got back in touch? Imagine if you were dying of cancer and felt completely unburdened? What if you were plagued by remorse for getting your friend imprisoned 10 years ago? If you were the one she got sent to prison and your release was granted to succumb to illness in her care? What if you had been a almost unstoppable pair of scam artists who still had a collection of costumes from your prime and a longing to feel some excitement again?

These questions and beyond form the core of Frauds, a new drama featuring Suranne Jones and Jodie Whittaker, flings at us on a wild, thrilling season-long journey that traces two conwomen determined to pulling off one last job. Similar to an earlier work, Jones developed this series with a writing partner, and it has all the same strengths. Much like the mystery-thriller formula 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 a means to explore an exploration of friendship, betrayal and love in all its forms.

Bert is released into the care of Sam (Whittaker), who resides close by in the Andalucían hills. Guilt stopped her from ever visiting Bert, but she has stayed close and worked no cons without her – “Rather insensitive with you in prison for a job I messed up.” And for her new, if brief, freedom, she has bought her plenty of new underwear, because various methods exist for female friends to show repentance and a classic example is the purchase of “a big lady-bra” after a decade of uncomfortable institutional clothing.

Sam wants to carry on leading her quiet life and care for Bert until her passing. 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 slowly resurfaces and Bert’s plans are already in motion by the time she reveals the complete plan for the robbery. The series experiments with chronology – to good rather than eye-rolling effect – to present key scenes initially and then the rationale. So we observe the duo slipping jewellery and watches off wealthy guests’ wrists at a memorial service – and acquiring a gilded religious artifact because what’s to stop you if you could? – before ripping off their wigs and reversing their funeral attire to become colourful suits as they walk confidently down the church steps, awash with adrenaline and loot.

They need the assets to fund the plan. This involves recruiting a forger (with, unbeknown to them, a betting addiction that is likely to draw unneeded scrutiny) in the form of magician’s assistant Jackie (Elizabeth Berrington), who has the technical know-how to help them remove and replace the target painting (a famous surrealist piece at a major museum). They also enlist art enthusiast Celine (Kate Fleetwood), who specialises in works by male artists exploiting women. She is as ruthless as any of the gangsters their accomplice and the funeral theft are attracting, including – most perilously of all – their former leader Miss Take (Talisa Garcia), a contemporary crime lord who had them running scams for her since their youth. She did not take well to the pair’s assertion of themselves as independent conwomen so there’s ground to make up there.

Plot twists are interspersed with progressively uncovered truths about the duo’s past, so you get all the satisfactions of a sophisticated heist tale – executed with no shortage of brio and admirable willingness to skate over rampant absurdities – alongside a captivatingly detailed portrait of a friendship that is possibly as toxic as Bert’s cancer but equally difficult to eradicate. Jones gives perhaps her finest and most complex performance yet, as the wounded, bitter Bert with her lifetime pursuit of excitement to divert attention from the gnawing pain within that is unrelated to metastasising cells. Whittaker stands with her, delivering excellent acting in a somewhat less flashy role, and alongside the creative team they craft a incredibly chic, deeply moving and highly insightful piece of entertainment that is inherently empowering without preaching and an absolute success. Eagerly awaiting future installments.