And so, early in 2018, all of us who have been sorely missing her since she left her Emmy-winning role in The Good Wife have the answer to What Archie Did Next, Properly, Not Just in Bits in US Shows That Never Quite Come to Prominence Here.
Last night began Next of Kin (ITV), a six-part thriller that puts Archie Panjabi – Kalinda the Semi-Murderous Sexbomb PI Extraordinaire in The Good Wife – at last front and centre, where she belongs. She plays Mona Shirani, a Pakistan-born, London-bred GP, in whose house her extended family are gathering to welcome home her brother Kareem from his latest stint out at the medical charity he runs in Lahore.
As he races to the airport – after a last-minute emergency appendectomy on a winsome child, which is fortunately the first and last touch of melodrama we see – he is abducted by fighters.
What follows is brutal and – even though we might have had an inkling about what a thriller centring on a Muslim family with roots in Pakistan and London would involve – shocking. And while plot points are sown – Kareem’s son Danny, they discover, left the country weeks ago and not for Spain as he claimed – and tensions heightened by a terrorist bomb in the city, it is the family’s shock and grief that are most comprehensively charted. The all but wordless sorrow of Mona and Kareem’s mother (Shabana Azmi) posed the silent question that most of us have when we hear about the executions of hostages and terrorists alike – how does anyone they leave behind bear it? Every one somebody’s son.
By the end of the opening episodes, fissures in the family are beginning to appear and suspicions to bud. Why is Mrs Shirani the only one to have her grandson’s new phone number? Guy (Jack Davenport, playing an almost-likable corporate smoothie), Mona’s British-born-and-bred husband, moves too easily for her comfort to the questions of whether Danny has been radicalised. A cousin didn’t meet him when he said he would; he was at loggerheads with his dad. If Danny has found solace in the ideologies of terrorism, who will be to blame?
I suspect from the trailer to next week’s episode – which teased numerous shenanigans, including Mona galloping off to Lahore to launch a one-woman investigation into her nephew’s whereabouts – that the series will not be interested in drilling too deeply into many of these questions. But it was, if nothing else, refreshing to see a Muslim family portrayed so naturally – a gaggle of individuals bound by love, frustrations and jokes and whose normality is as suddenly and thoroughly upended by tragedy as anyone’s could be.
Let us grant ourselves a boon and turn our faces towards unadulterated, real-life joy, namely, First Dates Hotel (Channel 4). The second series of the spin-off began last night and I am already a fibrillating mass of happiness.
The setting is different – a beautiful hotel in Campania, Italy – but the formula, praise be, is the same. Our singletons are matched by unseen toilers hoping to let love blossom rather than televisual carnage lay waste to hope and human hearts. There is kindness and generosity at its core instead of the brutal pursuit of humiliation and ratings.
Nursery assistant Kaylee – sweet, funny, direct, charming – was matched with Keiren, a highly depilated and personable bricklayer from Essex, but by the time of their date had already lost her heart to another (and remarkably similar, so no shame should attach to those unseen toilers, who so nearly got it right) hotel resident, Charlie. They sparked and sparkled together by the edge of the pool that morning, but she must wait in trepidation while he goes on a date with Jayda, his arranged match. Jayda is 10 gallons of hotness poured into a two-ounce bikini. In his interview, Charlie says that, after a lot of fun in his 20s, he is looking to become the man he should be. We must all have faith in Charlie.
I could write a book about the beauty of what unfolds between middle-aged Vanessa – brokenhearted by both a fleeting marriage to a chancer she met on holiday and bad news from the vet about her cat – and 55-year-old Julian, one of life’s natural nurturers, but I cannot do it justice here. My tear-stained notes read: “She’s broken but he can MEND her! He SEES her!” In their post-date interview, they nuzzle each other and he tells her there is an even lovelier person and even bigger character inside her waiting to come out. And there is! We can all see it! And he can, too! Oh, it’s too much, I tell you. Just watch it. Thank you, toilers. Your work here is done.
