White Lines (Netflix)
Little Fires Everywhere (Amazon)
Horizon: What’s the Matter With Tony Slattery? (BBC Two) | iPlayer
Becoming Netflix
These are the weeks when terrestrial TV would normally slip outside the studio for a sly fag; the late-spring early-holibags weeks when they can first get away with putting nothing on. That there is nothing on, exacerbated of course by the finishing of new drama having been Covid-contained since March, is just way more noticeable because we’re all stuck inside not watching it. It is not a nutritious mix. Breakfast television has become a sofa overstuffed with mawkish rainbows, 18-month-old uncomprehending infants forced to gawp into cameras and tell their nanas and Granda Beans how much they are loved, and then it’s into a packed, pointless dayful of political blame-gaming. Adverts attempt throughout (unsurprisingly) to monetise kindness. Even the Thursday clap has become faintly coercive.
Or we escape, hurrah we lucky ones, to streaming, which, bless, has come up with a few recent belters. White Lines, the bastard brainchild of Álex Pina, the Spanish showrunner of Money Heist and Left Bank Pictures (the production company behind, among much else, the recent Quiz), is a paean to Ibiza, yes, and to the mad-Manc druggie mores of the very late 90s, but it is so much more than either.
For someone who has never been to Ibiza, only once been to Manchester, and is possibly the only journalist in London in the 90s never to have taken cocaine – please don’t fret; I defaulted to much whisky – this still tugged at the soul. To have been there in that white sunlight, listening poolside to trance music, with young or merely younger limbs, must have been a little slice of very heaven.
Laura Haddock and Daniel Mays, the latter having apparently much more fun than in Sky’s dire Code 404, begin to excel after the first episode’s scene-setter. It settles down to half dirty-romcom, half panicked thriller, and somehow works on both stylish counts, with humour and bathos and bloodied boat hooks, and warring Spanish mafia and innovative torture (Boys Noize’s Distort Me on a lashed-up bank of speakers in a desert? I had my mute button on well before that handcuffed DJ’s eardrums physically burst at 150dB). Part of the charm is the eclecticism of the music – Primal Scream, shoegazing synth-filth, Gypsy Kings, cheesy Mancini, vaulting Mozart – but it seldom distracts from the story, which always hammers on in the way grand dramas do, constantly refettling.
Series two instantly looms, despite the brother’s death having been solved, and everyone’s wondering whether Zoe (Haddock) is going to get over her librarian’s pout to allow herself to be more in love with sexy bodyguard Boxer or nice hubby back home. There have been harder conundrums.
Little Fires Everywhere, the latest from Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine production company, which was also behind the triumphant Big Little Lies, is moreish, searing, excellent. What it is not is nuanced. It is based on Celeste Ng’s bestseller of 2017, and just very occasionally it has the feel of a creative-writing project writ large, with its leitmotif of a beloved poem (in this case Adrienne Rich’s Diving Into the Wreck) informing all, and not-knowingly-light emphasis on questions of motherhood, adoption, race.
But showrunner Liz Tigelaar has overhauled a book obviously loved for its language and intentions and forged something wise, fine, funny and, crucially, within drama’s parameters of telling a good on-screen story. Witherspoon plays something close to an older version of her character Tracy Flick in the 1999 film Election: living perfectly with four kids and lawyer hubby in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where, as the Shaker Good Neighbour Guide says, “everything can and should be planned to avoid uncertainty and disaster”.
Into this wander black single mother Mia and daughter Pearl. Witherspoon’s character, Elena, is confused over whether the nomenclature is “black” or “African American” but rents a flat to her anyway, through vague kindness, and those little fires begin to spread.
What annoys is that Elena is portrayed as such a tight-ass whitey. She has, for her reading group, to suffer The Vagina Monologues, and insists prissily on calling it “The Virginia Monologues”. She schedules sex with her husband on Wednesdays and Saturdays, written up with pink Post-It strips (“date-night: 9pm”) on the family-planner psychoboard, and allows herself 4oz of white wine nightly. She yearns for her daughter’s love, but black sheep Izzy likes to burn her own hair: “She just doesn’t participate, and if you don’t participate you can’t succeed.” The unexpressed quandary of every parent.
Mia and Izzy bond through art, and a desire for difference. There will be fires, and heartache, and a certain relentless messaging – any art is good and thus fascinating, yet any normality, by dint of privilege, is worthless. There are far deeper questions, which struggle for answers, than were possibly raised in the book alone: Witherspoon has manufactured a clever monster.
I was savagely unsure about reviewing Horizon: What’s the Matter With Tony Slattery?. Never mind that he is only featuring on telly because he featured a lot on telly many years ago – how many normal folks, having taken coke for a decade and slumped into a 20-year lacuna of alcoholism, get to weep on film? – he also came across as bumblingly inarticulate.
Until he didn’t. He still could talk, and cleverly. Of his need for drink: “I wake up angry and yet nothing gets done. There’s a grandiosity of ideas… a spasm of positivity, replaced by: ‘Uurgh, what’s the point.’”
Between three doctors, and always on the verge of tears when talking honestly, what emerged was a childhood trauma – at the age of eight, but a far more disruptive poison in view of his half-century’s denial. He was typical of men (like me) of a certain age who regard talking about these kind of things as achingly self-indulgent, or reductively “blamey” – or, worse, just socially boring.
Tony’s not cured, far from it, but his longstanding reluctance to accept the fact that he was sexually abused by a priest has been broken, 52 years later. Irish psychiatrist Ciaran Mulholland was great, Tony was eventually slightly saner, though still drinking; his partner, Mark, stoic, loving, indefatigible.
And it was perhaps a decent nod to Mental Health Awareness Week. Though it was cruel of so many news channels to focus on an elderly gentleman’s hydroxychloroquine obsession.
The Michelle Obama documentary Becoming (Netflix, of course) I had attempted naughtily to ski by, wary of the fact it might contain one or more mentions of the American notion of “owning” something – grief, race, ambition. As it happened, it was wonderful, all the aides spouting the “owning” guff detracting not one whit from the central message of a bright kid with strong parents who suddenly just decided not to be invisible any more, then, almost incidentally, fell in love.
Michelle told her story with charm, grit, adventurism and several appalling book-tour choices of dress. The eyes of young fans were drawn to her as magnets, and for the first time I got the idea of “role model” meaning less “I’d like to afford that shower” and more “I’d like to open that door”. And there was such remarkable kindness here – as there was in Mark Hutchinson’s subtle uncloying dedication to Mr Slattery: I really don’t think we’re short of kindness these long days, even as our televisions attempt to reduce that unselfish, deliberate, concept to pulpy sloganeering.
