It has been compared to both The Night Manager and The Sopranos and described as the must-see drama of 2018 – but the creators of hugely anticipated BBC thriller McMafia, say they drew their inspiration from a very different TV series.

“The show that was always at the back of our minds was The Wire,” explains director James Watkins, who created McMafia with Hossein Amini. “We were interested in the way that The Wire is a kind of microcosm of a city and wanted to create something like that. The difference is that our story takes place in the global city.”

McMafia is based on former Guardian and BBC journalist Misha Glenny’s nonfiction investigation into global organised crime of the same name. The TV drama tells the story of Alex Godman, the privately educated son of a Russian oligarch in exile, who appears to have largely rejected his family’s difficult past, choosing instead to become part of the British establishment. As the story begins he is living a gilded life, running his own hedge fund and engaged to his equally high-flying ethical banker girlfriend (Juliet Rylance).

But the past can’t stay buried for long, and Godman finds himself dragged into a dangerous game of cat and mouse involving gangsters from his Russian homeland and criminals from around the world.

The series’ complicated plotline and far-flung locations have seen it compared to the BBC’s slick 2016 hit The Night Manager, which saw Tom Hiddleston as a former British soldier caught up in a conspiracy involving US and British intelligence and the arms trade. But Watkins and Amini say their interests lay less in a straightforward thriller and more in examining a world in which “the corporate has become criminal and the criminal corporate”.

“The sort of shows that Hossein and I are inspired by – The Wire, Mad Men – have a richness in terms of social commentary that informs the entertainment,” Watkins says. Both men also cite Simon Moore’s acclaimed 1980s mini-series Traffik as an influence.

“We were really interested in the way that it allowed you to tell several stories and shift the focus to explore all the characters,” Watkins says. “The first series of McMafia is very Alex Godman-centric and could continue to be, but we haven’t even begun to explore the Middle East or Africa or even South America in detail. One of our ambitions would be to drop into some of these other places and by doing so bring the audience into a world that they wouldn’t necessarily have been in.”

The casting of James Norton as the conflicted Godman was key. “The thing with Alex is that there’s two sides to him,” says Watkins. “He’s been through the public school system and has this polished exterior, but underneath it all he is still his father’s son. James has played matinee idols and princes but he has also played Tommy Lee Royce [in crime drama Happy Valley], and we really saw the chance to collide those two types of character into one role.”

Amini and Watkins also wanted the rest of the casting to feel as authentic as possible. So Alex’s parents are played by Russian television star Mariya Shukshina and acclaimed Leviathan actor Aleksei Serebryakov, and there are key roles for Georgian actor Merab Ninidze, Bollywood star Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sweden’s David Dencik. “From the beginning we knew that we didn’t want stunt names,” says Amini. “We were very mindful of trying not to do the Russian cliche, which was why it was very important to have Russian actors in the key roles.”

It would have been awful to have had Alex’s father played by a big-name English actor putting on an accent, says Watkins. “The good thing about having so many Russian, Ukrainian and Georgian actors on set was that if we did ever drift into a trope, they’d react immediately. Because of that we were able to get under the surface and not do that whole Made in Chelsea bling version of the Russian experience in London.”

Amini, who moved to London with his family in the late 1970s after the Iranian revolution, also drew on his personal experiences to ensure that Alex’s complicated feelings towards his family and the country he was raised in felt authentic. “I definitely gave Alex some of my own experiences of feeling like both an outsider and an insider in this country,” he says.

“Most dramas dealing with politics or criminality tend to look backwards,” Amini adds. “But it felt more interesting to try and do something very current, that reflected the world we live in right now. There’s that sense that the stuff Alex is dealing with could be going on right now and right next to us. I think audiences really want that level of engagement now – we don’t just want empty calories when we watch something.”

Watkins agrees: “It’s actually a state-of-the-nation treatise on globalisation masquerading as a slick thriller – and we’re fine with that.”

McMafia begins on BBC1 on New Year’s Day at 9pm and then continues at 9pm the next day before moving to Sunday nights at 9pm