Television drama musings

Confession time: by habit I don’t watch much ‘meat and potatoes’ telly, but occasionally – usually by chance – I come across drama series that floats my boat.

For example, a few years back I was recommended the (what is now called) the Scandi-Noir piece The Killing featuring detective Sara Lund (played by Sofie Gråbøl -above) and became totally hooked. That said, such equivalents, or as some might have it superior offerings, as The Bridge or Borgen completely passed me by and now always will.

A British version of a tense police procedural (six-episode) series, Line of Duty (created and written by Jed Mercurio), is another of my obsessions – I mention it because its latest outing, Series 4, is about to begin on the BBC and I shall be glued to it.

I had completely missed Series 1 – still haven’t seen it – and first came to this one at the beginning of Series 2 with Keeley Hawes playing Detective Inspector Lindsay Denton, a flawed veteran caught up in an extraordinary and compelling scenario.

She became unwittingly caught up in a situation whereby an important witness ‘in protection’ being taken from one safe house to another under her supervision was brutally ambushed and murdered on an open road after which, seemingly against all the facts as presented, she became the prime suspect as the ‘insider’ who somehow arranged said assassination.

Cue the arrival at the police station of a special investigative unit set up by a higher authority with the sole purpose of uncovering and chasing down internal police corruption.

What followed was a gripping tale of endless twists and turns and ‘just the hell can you believe is a goodie and who is a baddie?’ with the hapless Denton at the centre trying to clear her name whilst around her all and sundry were helping or hindering her in her quest. This second series ended with her being found guilty in court and sentenced to prison.

Series 3, in my humble view, was even better. I’m not going to spoil it for Rust readers who have yet to see it, save to record that right at the end Denton – at last out of prison – reappears and attempts to prove that she was wrongly convicted and hopefully thus resume her career but (out of the blue, shockingly and suddenly) this ambition is abruptly and brutally curtailed.

I cannot wait for the start of Series 4.

Over the past three weeks I have been avidly watching The Replacement, written, produced and directed by Joe Ahearne.

Set in a Glaswegian architectural practice, it had a simple set up. Ellen (played by Morven Christie), a successful member of the practice, becomes pregnant and clearly, whilst she is away upon maternity leave, a replacement will have to be temporarily hired. From this low-key scenario things immediately go wrong. Paula (played by Vicky McClure, who coincidentally also plays a lead character in Line of Duty) – the replacement – is a bit suspect.

As soon as she arrives for the ‘handover’ period, she seems cool, confident and cocky. She starts buggering about with Ellen’s relationship with the client on a key library-build project, even making chances to Ellen’s design. Ellen, perhaps hormonally hyper-sensitive, quickly becomes suspicious and resentful at Paula’s constant meddling and manipulations and the principle ‘conflict’ (between eve-of-maternity-leave Ellen and brash but clever newcomer Paula) bubbles to the surface.

Neither is perfect. Ellen, by far the more sympathetic character, begins investigating and – the more she thinks she uncovers – the more suspicious and resentful she becomes, even though she’s having great difficulty convincing those around her at home, or in the office, that her conclusions are correct.

Meanwhile Paula, who (the viewer perhaps seeing things through Ellen’s eyes because we’re more familiar and sympathetic to her character, partly because we were introduced to her first) is apparently overtly manipulative and generally ‘evil’ in her actions, varies between behaving all ‘sweetness and light’ one minute and cold-hearted and devious the next.

I had a detailed conversation between episodes 2 and 3 (the final one) with my other half on a long car journey. We were both gripped by the story and keen to see how it unfolded.

I offered the theory that it ‘worked’ unusually well as a piece of drama firstly, because the quality of the acting performances was uniformly outstanding and secondly, because it appealed to both sexes. From the male point of view it did so primarily because of the twists and tales and sheer intensity/horror/excitement of the drama but also to a supplementary degree because the female protagonists were clearly both ‘a bit unhinged, scary and female-extreme’. In that sense, I felt that – for a male writer – Mr Ahearne had captured the essence of his female characters especially well.

Interestingly The Boss whole-heartedly agreed but then also added more on the fascination of the drama for female viewers and it was an aspect that she felt would have passed the bulk of male viewers completely. She said that female-female relationships generally [I’m not talking sexual ones here] are more complicated and multi-faceted than male-male ones.

Every woman is aware – whether it be in a social or a work context – of the little wiles, schemes, two-faced attitudes and complexities that colour the dynamics of female-female relationships, whether they be one-on-one or in a group situation.

She had noticed from my comments during the transmissions as we watched the series together that, though I had spotted some of the nuances and ‘false trails’ being given off in conversations and/or looks between Ellen and Paula, I tended to take most of what was happening at its face value.

Whereas she – and her thrust was, most women – would see further depths in the little gestures, smiles that might really be frowns (indeed or frowns that might really be smiles) and the sudden changes in demeanour between them. When Ellen appeared to say something friendly to Paula, was she actually being friendly or just trying to make Paula think so. And vice versa.

I guess there may be something in this suggested difference in how male and female viewers watched this particular piece of drama, or maybe it is all pieces of drama.

Another possibility is that the already-mentioned general excellence of the acting throughout – especially of the two female leads – contained hidden depths from which some viewers, well okay maybe some female viewers, gained greater insight and/or a sense of ‘oh, I recognise what’s going on between these two characters because I’ve been there myself’ than others did.

In any event, by the last episode this week (third of three), this male viewer had boiled the actions’ essence down to a very close contest between which of the female protagonists was more unhinged and scatty than the other.

That said, I found the last episode somewhat disappointing – I wouldn’t go so far as to say an anti-climax. The first two were so good that the urgency to tie up all the loose ends in just sixty minutes was (for this viewer) a task too far, resulting in some passages of ‘But it just wouldn’t happen like that in real life!’, e.g. when Ellen has recovered her ‘under threat’ baby in the library, the police (for no apparent procedural reason I could determine) brought Paula to the scene in order to handcuff her.

That was a case of dramatic licence falling over into absurdity in my view.