LAST Sunday night, as autumn leaves lay thick and still, one of the finest moments in contemporary Scottish culture came to a remarkable conclusion.

After a week of reflection I am convinced that the BBC One drama The Cry is the most important television drama that Scotland has ever produced. We already know it is a ratings success, the second most watched new drama on the BBC this year, but there is much more to measure about this landmark mini-series than volume alone.

What really excited me as a viewer, and as an industry diehard, is that the The Cry was produced by a relatively small Scottish independent production company. Claire Mundell’s Synchronicity Films have hung in there when others might have crumbled under the weight of rejection. The Cry is not only a triumph of storytelling – it is a victory for Scottish production in a brutally demanding television landscape that is structurally stacked against smaller producers, in favour of the bigger London-based companies.

If The Cry is anything it is a triumph of determination, but that is not all. The Cry stands out because of the sheer daringness of its story-telling – words like beginning, middle and end are all disrupted.

The story centres on the abduction of Noah, a newly born Scottish baby carried on a trip to Australia, where his father was born and raised. The energetic narrative style moves with sudden and asynchronous shifts between the streets of Glasgow, to Melbourne Airport, to an awe-inspiring Australian coastline and back to an intimidating Scottish courtroom. Each scene is revisited time and again either by witnesses, by new characters or the drama’s distraught central character, Noah’s grieving mother, played with enigmatic fortitude by the remarkable Jenna Coleman.

Scotland has brought many crime dramas and psychological thrillers to air – Taggart, Rebus and Shetland to name a few – but they mostly followed clever linear plot-lines and observed the conventions of the police procedural. None had such distinctive storytelling.

The Cry stands out because it takes risks in a medium so constricted by format. One scene, outside an Australian supermarket, is revisited on numerous different occasions, and each time offers up a new piece of detail or a new perspective on events. It is a scene with some similarities to Errol Morris’s historic true-crime documentary The Thin Blue Line, where perspective and false memory unsettle the viewer’s sense of right and wrong.

You are aware of Scotland throughout but importantly The Cry offers up many different versions of Scotland. There is the new government, where the father works as a special adviser, the primary school where the mother works as a classroom assistant, there are the streets of Finnieston with uber-cool cafes and hairdressers; the steep old Victorian stairways that the mother wearily navigates with a city buggy and all the accoutrements of the newborn child; then there is the framed exterior of GOMA, where the couple meet and socialise, and the elegantly-restored old tenement where they live in tense and professional comfort.

It is a drama that is comfortable with diversity too. The defence lawyer is played by Nigerian-Scot Moyo Akandé, the father’s workmate is portrayed by Sri Lankan-Scot Anneika Rose and the super-suspicious investigative detective in Australia is played by the campaigning Aboriginal actor Shareena Clanton.

The Cry was adapted from a novel by the Australian-Scot Helen Fitzgerald. Throughout the unnerving story, your mind wanders back through major child abduction cases, back beyond Madeleine McCann and to the case of the infamous Dingo-murder of Azaria Chamberlain. The mystery baffled Australia for years and a similar mood of suspicion and multiple suspects enriches The Cry.

A spirit of international co-production rages through the series. When contrasted with the towering television dramas of old, like A Boy’s Game and Just Another Saturday, which Peter McDougall brought to the screen in the 1970s, we see a very different nation. Back then, the landscape was decayed, brutal and industrial and McDougall’s dramas were inevitably dominated by troubled men struggling with violence, failure and sectarianism.

The Cry is mainly populated by women. All in some form are struggling to make sense of their roles and relationships as the lost child disturbs any hope of emotional equilibrium.

So The Cry is contemporary and reflects a changed Scotland, but is it Scotland’s greatest ever television drama? Yes, and unquestionably so. I concede there is formidable competition, but one-by-one I can dismiss them all.

In 1990, at the height of Glasgow’s reign as European City of Culture, Bill Bryden’s epic drama The Ship interrogated Glasgow’s shipbuilding past. It was literally riveting and in its original theatre version was performed at an abandoned Harland and Wolff workshop. A ship was built and then launched in front of the audience.

The Ship was a tour-de-force of contemporary Scottish theatre but its epic scale was curiously muted and boxed-in when it transferred to television.

Similarly, the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Black Watch, which toured Scotland and then re-configured for a centre-piece performance inside the Scottish Parliament. The much-anticipated show was cancelled when a terrorist cell tried to blow-up Glasgow Airport. Yet despite the play’s prescience, its regimental comradeship and its anti-war sentiments, it was never really suited to television either. So two of Scotland’s greatest theatrical narratives fell at the hurdle of adaptation.

Scottish theatre has been a rich and largely unrewarded breeding-ground for TV drama but transfers from stage to screen have never fared particularly well – The Slab Boys, The Steamie and even 7:84’s groundbreaking The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil were all cultural landmarks, but were more vibrant on stage than on the small screen.

Another serious contender is John Byrne’s magnus-opus Tutti Frutti, with its ensemble cast featuring Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson and the then unknown Richard Wilson, as the hapless rock ‘n’ roll manager Mr Clockerty.

Although written for television in the late eighties, the story was woven around the farewell tour of a rock ‘n’ roll group, The Majestics, and had all the brothel-creeping imagery of the Teddy Boys of the 1950s. It was in part defined and arguably constrained by one of the curses of Scottish culture - nostalgia.

To call Tutti Frutti a period piece would be an affront. but from its title to its performances it over-relied on the imagined past of rock ‘n’ roll and, to be brutal, was nowhere near as emotionally rich as The Cry. There was music, character and laughs aplenty, and deep in the storyline there was even a dead baby, but terrifying anxiety never troubled its warm and welcoming heart.

The Cry travels effortlessly too. Not only to Australia and back, but to audiences across the UK. This is in marked contrast to Scotland’s other standout hit of recent years, the fictional sitcom Still Game. Jack and Victor’s ageing neddery has phenomenal audience penetration in Scotland, but has made no great impact in the UK network, where it was damagingly scheduled and poorly supported.

Make no mistake, outside of Scotland The Cry is a mighty juggernaut, selling internationally into global markets where it is guaranteed to be shown for years to come, whilst Still Game is an acquired taste, supremely popular at home but incapable of travelling much further.

Producing high-quality content that is relevant to domestic audiences whilst achieving global popularity is the circle that Scottish producers will always have to square.

We have seen the blueprint, and the next stage in Scottish television’s long battle for relevance is about demanding more and better.

The final book in Stuart Cosgrove’s Soul Trilogy, ‘Harlem 69: the Future of Soul’ is published by Polygon.