As a parent, it’s intriguing to imagine how your child interacts with other children at nursery. Are they the dominant alpha, the dreamy wallflower or the tantrum princess? Last year’s The Secret Life of Four-Year-Olds was such a success (Channel 4’s highest-rated single documentary of 2015) because it attempted to uncork that mystery. With a handful of psychologists observing from behind a screen, you could lie to yourself that you were watching the most important behavioural-development study since Kinsey and not just an extended version of Kids Say The Funniest Things.
In reality, the programme was an excuse to coo at adorable children playing at being adults, like an hour-long Andrex puppy advert. The success of Secret Life ... spawned many spin-offs (versions for five- and six-year-olds as well as a Christmas special). Now, some of the cast are back, and they have brought their younger siblings with them. The Secret Life of Brothers and Sisters (Channel 4) follows seven boy and girls, who are five or six years old, and their siblings, who have an average age of two.
The cast of characters are reliably cute archetypes. There’s Alfie, who is extremely attentive to two-year-old Daisy. It’s eye duct-moistening stuff, despite the fact that Alfie (six) uses words like “pandemonium”. There’s also attention-deprived older sister Tia, who describes having a younger sibling, Amelia Lily, as being “like a dream come true and a night-mare” (she shouts the “night” bit). When Tia draws a picture of her family, she sketches in Amelia Lily as an unborn foetus in her mother’s stomach. Amelia Lily is two.
But as much as we can lap up passive aggressive moments like these, other narrative threads are uncomfortable. Seeing Hayden failing to interact with her older brother, the dreamy Tyler, who we are told is on the lower end of the autism spectrum, feels voyeuristic. Tyler’s emotional disconnection from his sister is played out in isolation from the rest of the action as if the producers didn’t quite know how to handle the situation. It makes for uneasy viewing.
The programme shifts its focus to the scientific tasks, ostensibly to unpick relations between older and younger siblings. But the experiments, such as a competition to see who can build the tallest stick tower (analogue Jenga), don’t really teach us anything we didn’t already know about sibling relationships. Which is that, although cliches may apply, they’re all completely different from one another. Why can’t they display unifying characteristics so programme makers can make some nice sweeping generalisations about them? Kids, eh? Really, these interfamilial experiments feel like an excuse to segue into more Pixar moments. Like precocious, future counsellor Alfie being reunited with best friend Emily (“We’re going to marry each other!”), Surprise Surprise-style. Cute points: 10, programme points: five.
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Like the ex we keep inviting back into our lives only to let them hurt us again and again, we keep willing Jennifer Lopez to do something great. Because, Out of Sight and Jenny from the Block notwithstanding, Lopez’s career has been a race to the middle. Could Shades of Blue (Sky Living) be her Homeland and change all that? In a word: “no”. Despite a creative dream team (Ray Liotta plays Lopez’s boss, Barry “Diner” Levinson directs the first episode) this is a New York cop show that feels so identikit it actually backdates itself somewhere in the early 00s.
Lopez plays Harlee Santons, a fast-talking, hard lovin’ cop and single mother. Instead of carrying the show off with her star power, Lopez’s Santos feels thin and underwritten, a composite of every hard-done-by but resilient character with perfect hair she has played since 2002. Cliches come thick and fast: every copper is bent, everyone seems to be called Vinnie, and people end scenes in fits of laughter when there’s nothing to laugh about. In fact, there’s nothing here we haven’t seen before and done better on shows such as Law & Order and the CSI franchise. To make matter worse, there’s a touch of unintentional Airplane-esque hilarity about the whole thing. You can’t help but think of Rashida Jones’s slapstick comedy Angie Tribeca as you watch the stagey action and occasionally creaky dialogue unfold. It makes you echo Mariah Carey’s infamously brutal sentiment about Lopez: “I don’t know her.”
