Sophie Okonedo, Marc Warren, Rufus Jones et al join W’s Flack
BBC One green lights: series of surveillance thriller The Capture, December-May drama Gold Digger, abuse pay-off drama Dark Mon£y and dementia mystery drama Elizabeth is Missing
In the US: Sundays, 8/7c, CBS
In the UK: Acquired by Sky Living
There is a genre of drama known as ‘competence porn’. Don’t worry, this isn’t what it sounds like.
The defining feature of ‘competence porn’ is a character who’s just good at everything. They’re rich, they dress well, they’re good at their job, they don’t make mistakes, they don’t trip over cracks in the pavement. Whatever life throws at them, they use their top-notch brain, balletic grace and wealth of experience to overcome the odds and beat their adversaries.
Usually, it’s a straight white male who’s the star of competence porn – think James Bond, Sherlock Holmes or even Matt Damon in The Martian. But not always – Olivia Pope in Scandal is straight black female competence porn, for example.
Now, in Instinct, we have possibly the first TV instance of gay white male competence porn*. Based on a James Patterson novel, its shockingly competent central hero is Dr Dylan Reinhart, a well dressed, best-selling author, university lecturer and former CIA field officer and paramilitary, capable of slapping around bad guys while simultaneously theorising about whatever psychological issues led them to try to hit him in the first place. He’s also gay and gave up his CIA career so he could he could get married and have a normal life with his now ex-husband.
When a serial killer starts murdering people and sends the NYPD a copy of Reinhart’s book about mental abnormality, detective Bojana Novakovic (Edge of Darkness, Shameless) seeks out Reinhart and enlists him in the hunt for the killer. Which is handy because Reinhart’s agent is pressing him for a new, exciting book and Novakovic hasn’t got on with any of her new partners since the death of her ex-partner and fiancé. Gosh, if only this was the start of a beautiful, completely platonic, crime-solving partnership.
All of which sounds great and wonderfully diverse, if otherwise a little bit formulaic. The only problem? Reinhart is played by Alan Cumming. Yes, this Alan Cumming.
France 2 green lights: Victor Hugo biopic Victor Hugo, ennemi d’État (Victor Hugo: Enemy of the State), with Yannick Choirat and Isabelle Carré [French]
In Australia: Fridays, 8.30pm, ABC
In the UK: Tuesdays, 9pm, Alibi. Starts July 17
The globalisation of TV is a funny old thing, resulting in some odd paradoxes. Consider the career of Ioan Gruffudd, a fine actor who speaks Welsh as a first language. Naturally, he got his first big break on S4C’s Pobol Y Cwm (People of the Valley), S4C being the government’s attempt to preserve the Welsh language from the effects of globalisation and English’s worldwide dominance.
However, given S4C’s drama output isn’t huge, it’s unsurprising that Gruffudd went off to London to study at RADA, before getting his first big breaks in the BBC’s 1996 remake of Poldark and then ITV’s Hornblower TV films, where he naturally had to put on English accents and spoke English. They in turn led to starring roles in US films Black Hawk Down (directed by Englishman Ridley Scott) and superhero movie Fantastic Four, in which he played Americans.
Then US TV shows beckoned, with first the short-lived Century City, then Ringer then ABC’s Forever, in which he played a forensics examiner who just happened to be immortal, and so was a font of all knowledge and an almost Sherlock Holmes-like ability to read people and clues. In the latter two shows, despite both being made in the US, Gruffudd played English characters – globalisation here allowing for local diversity, not just homogenisation.
And yet… while Gruffudd has since returned home to the UK to do shows such as ITV’s Liar, now he’s gone to Australia to star in ABC’s Harrow. Guess what? Despite the show being Australian, he plays an English forensic examiner who’s a font of all knowledge and has an almost Sherlock Holmes-like ability to read people and clues. Sounds familiar, hey? What’s even odder, globalisation-wise, is that this is the first show to be made by ABC International Studios – not even ABC Australia, at that, but ABC US, which was of course the network that created Forever.
Globalisation paradox.
Harrowing
While Australia obviously has a final tradition of legal dramas (eg Crownies, Janet King, Newton’s Law) and police soap operas (eg Cop Shop), it’s noticeably not had much by way of police procedural dramas. Harrow is in part an attempt to fill this hole and join the rest of the world, probably by exporting it, probably to Netflix. After all, if S4C can do it, Australia should be able to do it, too.
Gruffudd plays the eponymous Harrow, a maverick forensics examiner in Brisbane. His flouting of the rules is not much loved by his boss (Robyn Malcolm) and his general work demeanour means his work colleagues don’t much love him either, although new scene of crime officer Mirrah Foulkes seems to be taking something of a shine to him. However, he’s great at his job, so he’s tolerated, even if he keeps threatening to resign every five minutes.
Meanwhile, he’s going through a divorce, something that’s caused his teenage daughter (Ella Newton) to virtually break off contact from both him and her mother (Anna Lise Phillips). But Gruffudd has a plan to win his daughter back. If only he didn’t have a deep dark secret that’s about to get found out…
