It has long been a trope of TV drama that any crime committed has, in its origin, to go “right to the very top”. Down here won’t do, nor will the middle. It has to lead right to the very top. Far from lapsing into cliche, the notion of shadowy elites and elaborate conspiracies has intensified as a small-screen dramatic staple. The intrigue surrounding Donald Trump’s election campaign and the alleged criminality of EU leave campaigners in the UK (with Vladimir Putin all but sitting stroking a white cat in the background) have, if anything, left dramatists struggling to keep up in their own parallel realities.
David Hare’s Collateral was a classic example of a web of intrigue that in 2018 seemed feasible rather than far-fetched. It featured John Simm as an MP in a Labour party in which Corbyn never happened. The leader is a woman who has a “Controls on Immigration” mug taken from Ed Miliband’s general election campaign. In the drama, immigration was a fraught and divisive issue that had to be handled discreetly by hidden operatives. It all rang true, and the machinations cost a pizza delivery man his life. Simm’s judgment of the UK as in danger of becoming a “nasty little country” had the gammon-whiff of truth about it, especially in the era of the hostile environment. This was a procedural in which procedure was replaced – albeit clunkily at times – with a meditation on modern Britain.
Last year, I wondered in these pages how TV drama was going to cope with the ascent of Trump, a far grosser and stranger figure than any fiction could concoct. The Good Fight, a spin-off from The Good Wife, provided an immediate response: make the actual Trump, rather than some fictional parody of him, a feature of the drama. Trump is hardly shadowy – his awfulness is revealed daily and in vivid orange detail under the spotlight in which he revels. Yet accusations of criminality and collusion are dogging his administration, and this was the stuff of The Good Fight, including a ricin letter threat, as the series struggled to keep pace with real life.
Black Earth Rising also derived its potency from drawing on actual events – the horror of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Its creator, Hugo Blick, is an old hand at depicting shadowy elites – as he showed with The Shadow Line in 2011 – whose improbable characters, Stephen Rea’s Gatehouse in particular, belonged very much in the world of fiction. In Black Earth Rising, Blick dealt with tragedy beyond any creative imagination, and one whose aftermath he depicts as involving a conspiracy of silence, benevolent and brutal. The massacre itself, as well as the others it engendered, was only indirectly depicted, using judicious animation. It remains “obscene” (in the sense of offstage). The drama was really concerned with how such events are managed in the lengthy aftermath – the misplaced desire to erase history in order to move forward. But such erasures can only be managed and conducted at the highest level – and not necessarily in the public interest.
Killing Eve tickled many with its bracing daftness and the subtle way it messed with the sometimes ponderous rhythms of BBC drama, suggesting that everyone making it was having tremendous fun. Yet for all that, its underlying proposal – of assassinations carried out simply with the intention of sowing chaos – is one that rings very true in 2018, as a smirking Putin and his operatives look on around the world; the novichok poisonings (and the almost facetious denials of involvement by the Russians) and the brazen audacity of the Khashoggi murder, carried out in the expectation of impunity, spring to mind. Putin may have had a wry smile at The Romanoffs, too, with its tales of supposed descendants of the Russian imperial dynasty, especially when a mock execution, Bolshevik style, goes horribly wrong at the expense of Christina Hendricks’ Olivia.
In an age of ever-widening inequality, the excesses of the superrich and powerful were laid all too plausibly bare in dramas such as Trust, which retold the, at times farcical, story of the kidnapping of the heir to the Getty empire. Then there was Patrick Melrose, which exposed the monstrous and unchecked sexual habits of a patriarch, a monstrous paragon of entitlement – and, in passing, the unmasked, obnoxious hauteur of our royal family, as personified by Princess Margaret. Succession, meanwhile, told the story of the machinations of a Murdoch-style media empire, whose head, played by Brian Cox, refuses to fade away.
There were criticisms of some of 2018’s drama series – The Little Drummer Girl, the BBC adaptation of a John le Carré novel, based on the manipulations of an Israeli spymaster, has left many viewers bamboozled by its byzantine plot and multiple developments. Bodyguard, meanwhile, despite its popularity, alienated some viewers as Jed Mercurio, as is his wont, heaped sensational plot development upon earth-shattering twist, turning the dial to 11 time and again, as if obliged to outdo himself.
For all that, the idea of active international espionage or prime ministers facing the sack for things they’re up to no longer feels like the stuff of conspiracy theory. The incredible has become credible. What is actually happening, what is being painstakingly investigated by Robert Mueller in the political sphere or in the journalism of Carole Cadwalladr, shows how clandestine, behind-the-scenes criminality is no longer the stuff of overheated, conspiratorial imaginations, but a reality that is being enabled and revealed in the internet age. Drama is doing well simply to be a pale shadow of the murky times in which we live.
