It would have been great in cold, dry January to have an addictive thriller to look forward to every week. Instead, we got McMafia – and the agonisingly unengaging organised-crime drama isn’t the only recent series to show that Britain struggles to thrill in the era of Peak TV.
McMafia (Sundays, BBC1) arrived with a strong backstory. It is based on the writings of journalist Misha Glenny and takes place amid a new world of sophisticated, globalised crime. Its protagonist is a hedge-fund manager who goes rogue when his Russian family’s dodgy dealings lead to tragedy. He’s played by man of the moment James Norton, apparently using the series to achieve the dream all actors are striving for at all times: to be cast as James Bond.
Meanwhile, ITV welcomed Good Wife breakout star Archie Panjabi back to UK telly with a potentially meaty lead role. In Next of Kin (Mondays), she’s Mona, a London GP of Pakistani descent whose relatives include both a victim and a perpetrator of the sort of terror attacks that cause people like Mona to be treated with hostile suspicion.
Both series are examples of British dramas with international ambitions, telling stories that span multiple locations and invite comparison with globe-trotting American thrillers such as Homeland. How dispiriting then, that both have turned out to be so tentative, so slow, and so … smalltime.
British shows are not necessarily hobbled by having fewer episodes and less money than their US counterparts. Critics in the US recently wild for the final season of BBC4’s Detectorists and the first of Channel 4 and Netflix’s The End of the F***ing World, because they each offer something unique within their genres. It would be possible to bring the careful detail and eccentric flair of those shows to the thriller format. British telly’s need for shorter, cheaper runs also ought to help it make punchy mini-series: the drama that McMafia and Next of Kin both seem to be aping, The Night Manager – which, like McMafia, was a co-production between the BBC and a US cable network – demonstrated how to elegantly stuff six episodes with a story about an ordinary person drawn into lethal international intrigue.
McMafia and Next of Kin have noticed that we liked Night Manager’s exotic locations, so they’ve taken us to Bangalore, Lahore and the Cote d’Azur, not realising that the glamorous foreign jaunts were just the backdrop for the nerve-chafing pas de deux between mole Tom Hiddleston and evil arms dealer Hugh Laurie. In Next of Kin, the bad guys are rarely seen. In McMafia, the twist of the gangsters controlling their empires like multinational CEOs has killed the drama stone dead: the antagonists mostly stay in their home countries, waging war remotely and dispassionately. Until the latest episode’s ending finally delivered some physical consequences, a dramatic development was someone calling someone else, or Norton clicking “transfer funds” when he really jolly well shouldn’t have.
The Night Manager also – like Homeland – had rich characters all the way down the cast, notably Tom Hollander’s toxic sidekick Corky, and it didn’t fall into the common thriller trap of featuring two-dimensional women. Olivia Colman’s no-frills spook and Elizabeth Debicki’s brittle moll were among its most memorable creations. Next of Kin, in contrast, has a stereotypically impulsive, bumbling lady-person as its main character: last week, Mona was surprised when bank transfers and phone calls proved to be traceable. ITV’s chaotically implausible 2017 conspiracy thriller Fearless, with Helen McCrory as a virtually superhuman human rights lawyer turned detective, might have been a misfire but at least it was trying.
Neither McMafia nor Next of Kin has the nuance or depth to cover up lulls in the main narrative. Even their central relationships are empty, with Next of Kin’s Panjabi and Jack Davenport, potentially a contemporary and challenging rendering of a mixed-race couple, ending up as merely middle-class twits who are too bewildered to have any agency. McMafia’s domestic scenes between James Norton and Juliet Rylance, vaguely troubled in their luxury London flat, are so sterile and eerily silent they have an air of experimental theatre, like Pinter being staged in a branch of Heal’s.
And boy, are there story lulls that need filling. Both McMafia and Next of Kin are so short of incident they’ve been forced to introduce the same strict rationing system of one development only per episode, in the final five minutes, with 50 minutes of stuttering set-up to sit through beforehand.
The result is that, with two episodes left to run of both series, each of them has only just got going. But we’re living through Peak TV, the most fecund period of programme-making TV drama has ever known. Unless you’re Twin Peaks you need to get the hell on with it, and at times, McMafia and Next of Kin have in any case made Twin Peaks look like a brisk romp. When everyone has 28 unseen, critically acclaimed box sets staring at them resentfully from their watchlist, being dull is death.
