Sarah Lancashire, Sinéad Cusack and Paul Ready join BBC Two’s MotherFatherSon
W green lights: series adaptation of Lorna Martin’s chaotic-lived thirtysomething women comedy drama Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown as Women on the Verge, with Kerry Condon, Nina Sosanya and Eileen Walsh
It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching this week
June’s here, which means the summer TV season is beginning in the US (and the winter season in Australia). It’s quite a long season mind, with new shows starting all the way through to August (those that dare brave TMINE’s holiday wrath, anyway), so brace yourself for lots of new shows over the next few months. Woo hoo!
Elsewhere, as well as mopping up the whole of the first season of Netflix’s Safe in one go, I’ve reviewed the first episodes of Reverie (US: NBC) and Picnic at Hanging Rock(Australia: Showcase; UK: BBC Two). I’ll be covering the first couple of episodes (at least) of movie spin-off Mystery Road (Australia: ABC) this week and I might even manage to watch Dietland (US: AMC; UK: Amazon), too, given the first two episodes are already available in the UK. Anything after that will be a bonus (eg Cobrai Kai, Movie Monday) – in particular, Succession (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic) looks dull and worthy, despite the presence of Brian Cox (the other one), but I’ll try to squeeze it in, at least.
However, I definitely won’t be watching Ryan Murphy’s trans-friendly 80s New York drama Pose (US: FX) because of the golden TMINE motto: “Tough on musicals, tough on the cause of musicals.”
However, the remnants of the spring season are still with us, so after the jump, Bron/Broen (The Bridge), Legion and Westworld, as well as the series finale of the already-missed The Americans.
Amazon green lights: series adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad
Australian TV
Stan green lights: series of cold case crime drama The Gloaming and youth-restoring plant drama Bloom, and No Activity Christmas special
Scandinavian TV
Viaplay (Sweden) green lights: series adaptation of Per Schlingmann’s I maktens öga as The Inner Circle (Den inre cirkeln), with Niklas Engdahl, Nanna Blondell and Ebba Hultkvist Stragne
Sometimes, you really can get the wrong end of the stick with these international productions. When I first heard about Safe, it was via an article in Le Figaro. Audrey Fleurot from Engrenages (Spiral), Michael C Hall from Dexter, in a Netflix drama written by US thriller writer Harlan Coben and set inside a gated community? Brilliant! It’ll be like Sky Atlantic’s Riviera – except good.
Sure, it was also going to feature the likes of Marc Warren (Mad Dogs) and Amanda Abbington (Sherlock), and at least some of it was going to be filmed in Britain, but I mentally glossed over that. Audrey, Michael, Harlan, all that talk by Le Figaro of Harlan’s obsession with French actresses – it was going to be exotic, wasn’t it? Maybe a bit in the UK, but mostly it would be in France, right? Or maybe 50/50? Why else cast Fleurot?
Then I saw the trailer.
Wait. That was all Britain. Nothing but Britain. No sunshine, no France, no French. Just Britain. Not even a good bit of Britain at that, but Manchester.
And what was that accent, Michael? Why haven’t they allowed you to be American? And have you been watching The Only Way is Essex with Chris Pratt?
Then I remembered – Harlan Coben had co-written that Sky1 show The Five with Danny Brocklehurst, hadn’t he? And Brocklehurst was one of the writers for Safe, too.
Oh dear God. This was actually a British show. It was basically a Sky1 show with a slightly more international cast than usual, but on Netflix. Oh the horror!
So that was the stick I incorrectly grasped with Safe. Although we in the UK obviously associate Netflix with bringing us both their own programmes made overseas and other country’s programmes that they’ve bought up, that’s something they do for everyone else, too, and this was going to be like The Crown – another entry in the ‘international TV that we made in the UK for everyone else’ category. We would be the rest of the world’s ‘exotic’.
However, there was a second stick. My assumption was that because it was UK TV made in the UK by a UK production company and written by UK writers, it was going to be unwatchable rubbish. Just dreadful, I thought.
Surprise! It’s not. Indeed, Safe isn’t half bad. A bit silly and even comedic in places – and not just Hall’s accent – with episode endings that push the boundaries of plausibility to their limits, but actually halfway decent. I even watched it all the way through to the end. That’s a first for me and a British TV drama in rather a long time…
