Back in June, things were looking a lot more optimistic for those of us wishing Anna Friel would stage a major comeback. As well as keeping the British end up in More4’s second world war Scandi drama The Saboteurs, Friel was about to debut in Odyssey on BBC2, a juicy geopolitical thriller that placed her front and centre as Odelle Ballard, a US soldier betrayed and left for dead in Mali after acquiring evidence of a major Wall Street firm funding terrorism.
Odyssey was pitched by its producers as a modern-day take on Homer’s epic poem, brought sizzlingly up-to-date by mixing in drone strikes, Twitter likes, the Greek financial crisis and the ethics of using private military contractors to wage war in the Middle East. With its additional emphasis on evil terrorists, computer hacking and mission-critical flash drives, Odyssey also seemed to take inspiration from another source that Homer, blind or not, would probably agree was a modern classic: 24.
But the first few episodes felt leaden where they should have been thrilling, and it soon became obvious that despite Friel’s nominal headlining status, there there actually three protagonists. Depressingly, the other two were white guys steeped in New York privilege: Decker (Peter Facinelli), a former US attorney who realises his slick new employers are up to no good, and Harrison (Jake Robinson), a rich, bratty activist acting out an Occupy Wall Street version of Pulp’s Common People who happens to stumble across evidence of the conspiracy.
Even worse, after surviving the sneak attack that wiped out her unit, Odelle immediately becomes a prisoner with no agency. In quick succession, she is buried up to her neck to be stoned by angry nomads then scooped up by terrorists determined to behead her on-camera. Odysseus blinded a Cyclops; Ballard is forced to deliver a hostage video. Initial reviews were either unimpressed or actively unkind, with the Radio Times winning the zinger battle for hearts and minds with “more Poundland than Homeland”.
Even in the league table of Homeric adaptations, Odyssey seemed to be languishing behind the vintage French animated version set in the 31st century.
In the US, the show was quietly cancelled by NBC. But for those of us who have stuck with Odyssey on Sunday nights, it has slowly developed into something with a little more heart and soul than its initial programmatic set-up suggested. Odelle, desperate to get back to her husband and young daughter in the US, becomes far more interesting once she escapes her captors (a nasty business involving a sharpened spoon). As a Female Engagement Team specialist with language skills and medical training, Odelle isn’t helpless on foreign soil. But she can’t do it alone, and the complicated, co-dependant relationship she develops with Aslam (Omar Ghazaoui), a hotheaded 14-year-old Muslim, slowly becomes the emotional centre of the series.
The thriller plot requires Odelle to be actively prevented from making home, which means a lot of cat-and-mouse business across Africa with the grim-faced mercenaries tasked with locating and killing her. But even the underwritten material is elevated by Friel’s committed performance. Odelle’s grit, resourcefulness and emotional intelligence is also highlighted by the fact that her male co-leads – particularly the blabbermouth Harrison, who keeps spilling his guts to the attractive asset assigned to surveil him – are constantly portrayed as guileless dum-dums hopelessly outmatched by the shadowy military-industrial forces pitted against them.
It’s been a bumpy journey, then, but there have been some real joys in Odyssey. It’s rare to see a mainstream US network drama spend so much time in Africa, and while the introduction of Shakir Khan, an outrageous drag queen with her own Malian chat show, seemed tonally haphazard, it provided an injection of wit and glam just when the show needed it. But perhaps the greatest pleasure of Odyssey has been its TV tombola approach to casting.
There’s poor old “Prez” Pryzbylewski from The Wire as Odelle’s fretting husband, Penelope to her Odysseus. A key hacker role is filled by one of the skeezy McPoyle brothers from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. An accented Orla Brady is the Greek prime minister-in-waiting. Former Smallville newshound Allison Mack has been ingratiating herself with Odelle’s daughter by dropping some major JRR Tolkien geek knowledge. Even the operative assigned to monitor Harrison bears an uncanny resemblance to Brenda from Beverly Hills 90210. If Odyssey had somehow become a cultural phenomenon like Lost, surely one of the prevailing fan theories would be that Odelle had actually died with her unit in the original attack, reframing the entire series as a personal purgatory populated by half-remembered faces plucked from her late-night channel-surfing.
Foremost among these vaguely familiar faces is Grégory Fitoussi, most recently of Mr Selfridge but forever fixed in many minds as Spiral’s dashing, principled defence lawyer Pierre. In Odyssey, Fitoussi is a drug trafficker named Luc who seems to view Odelle as just another commodity to be exploited: he is heartless, cruel, rude. Seeing Fitoussi play an authentic bad guy is almost as distracting as hearing him speak English. But – spoiler – Luc is just Han Solo-ing the whole thing, and watching the smuggler with a secret heart of gold spark with Odelle, with each capable of cursing each other out in fluent French, has added some much-needed heat to Odyssey’s sprint to the finish line. In Sunday’s finale, surely Odelle must somehow expose the conspiracy and find her way home to her daughter and Prez. But seeing her bicker and bond with Luc, it’s possible to imagine an alternate ending that leaves all the tedious unfinished business with Decker and Harrison in New York far behind, Homer be damned.
Have you been enjoying Odyssey? Let us know in the comments below
