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Weird guttural soundscapes and shots of invitingly warm but terribly creepy doorways lend shades of The White Lotus to this conventional thriller set in a cul-de-sac. But a little stylistic imitation isn’t the main problem with the second series of The Couple Next Door.
Despite achieving record-breaking streaming success for Channel 4 when the first series premiered in 2023, this follow-up is incredibly slow to deliver – and the wait is arduous. Given the tantalising promise of neighbourly hanky-panky, viewers must endure hours of tedious hospital drama before they’re rewarded. And even then, director Dries Vos hardly serves up Mills & Boon. Sometimes the intimacy is so over-stylised it makes you laugh, although there is some nicely slo-mo camerawork trailing the flirtatious moments beforehand which titillate more than the sex itself.
With a new cast (except for Hugh Dennis, who returns as neighbourhood outcast Alan, the most compelling part) we start the series somewhere in the suburbs near Leeds, where Charlotte, played by Annabel Scholey, and Jacob, Sam Palladio, are living the dream. Or are they? As we see, their marriage is pretty dull - a situation not helped by the fact that they work together at the local hospital. Then a mysterious nurse called Mia, played by Aggy K. Adams, lands a job there too. It's not long before she moves in next door and starts coercively inserting herself into the couple’s lives.
Mia is clearly designed to convey more than a shade of Killing Eve’s Villanelle, but that’s an impossibly high bar. The Couple Next Door doesn’t have the gravitas to pull off that level of suspense or intrigue, and is far too often a paint-by-numbers thriller with thinly veiled everything: premise, script, direction. Writer David Allison’s script, loosely adapted from the Scandi drama Dopamin, rarely sounds like actual speech and often stifles the potential for character development.
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When the supposedly suspenseful bits finally kick in, key reveals are fudged due to directorial oversight, killing the potency and reducing this to soap opera. Adams is especially burdened by the show’s lack of imaginative turns: she seems a capable actor, but shonky timing means some of her scenes miss the beat, and cringey dialogue extinguishes flames. “All men work the same, you just need to make them feel irresistible,” is one of her faux profound statements. The most AI-sounding line of the series is delivered by Maimie McCoy’s hospital manager Gemma to Charlotte’s former lover Leo, played by Sendhil Ramamurthy. When his father is dying she says of the grieving process: “It's hard for us to process, and that's okay.”
As for Scholey and Palladio’s central surgeon and anesthetist (who are supposedly the heart of the series), their whole thing is to basically engage in a lot of insufferable pass-ag back and forths. She’s the surgeon and spends a lot of time correcting male counterparts when they assume he’s the more senior of the two, and Jacob says “right, okay, errr, thank you” a lot to get across how he’s a conventionally awkward British man. The second a scene is about to get real, or go on long enough to find some depth, the story moves on to something else.
As things go on, characters start explaining the plot lines to us like we’re children. There’s the beginnings of an interesting examination into the passing-on of inherited trauma, and some nice ruminations on flaws in the social justice system when it relates to middle aged men like Dennis’ character Alan, who seems to get more of a character arc than the leads.
But these moments of promise are fleeting, diluted by the tired conventionality elsewhere. Audiences may have found The Couple Next Door fitted snugly into guilty pleasure territory, but this new helping is not ridiculous, or carnal, enough for that.
The Couple Next Door is streaming on Channel 4
