McGuigan’s early television credits include Spooks (2002), Hustle (2004), Bleak House (2005) and The Amazing Mrs Pritchard (2006). His cinematography on the BBC adaptation of Bleak House, starring Gillian Anderson, Charles Dance and Anna Maxwell Martin, earned him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Cinematography for a Miniseries or Movie in 2006.
His feature film work includes The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), directed by Justin Chadwick, Love Ranch (2010), directed by Taylor Hackford, The Whistleblower (2010), directed by Larysa Kondracki, and Killing Bono (2011), directed by Nick Hamm. He also photographed Christopher and His Kind (2011), a television film directed by Geoffrey Sax, and Bert & Dickie (2012), the BBC drama about Britain’s double gold medal victory in rowing at the 1948 London Olympics.
McGuigan continued to work extensively in television drama, with credits including The Great Fire (2014), Grantchester (2016–2017), Strike Back (2015–2018) and Humans (2018). He served as director of photography on multiple episodes of Grantchester, the ITV detective drama set in 1950s Cambridgeshire, and the science-fiction series Humans.
His subsequent credits include White Lines (2020), Silent Witness (2020), The Mallorca Files (2019), The Fear Index (2022) and Moonhaven (2022). He also worked on the second series of The Capture (2022), the BBC thriller directed by Ben Chanan.
In recent years, McGuigan has worked on BBC productions including Inside No. 9, Domino Day (2023) and the A Ghost Story for Christmas adaptations Lot No. 249 (2023), Woman of Stone (2024) and The Room in the Tower (2025), directed by Mark Gatiss. His credits also include Trigger Point, working on its fourth series, scheduled for 2025.