The Brink (Sky Atlantic) actually started last week, but with a new comedy it’s sometimes worth waiting to see if it hits its stride in episode two.
A satirical take on US government diplomacy – specifically geopolitical crisis, The Brink occupies territory normally squatted by straight drama: The West Wing, Homeland, House of Cards. Tim Robbins is secretary of state Walter Larson; Jack Black plays a scheming but ineffectual State Department functionary stationed in Pakistan, where a coup has taken place, interrupting Larson’s standing appointment with a prostitute.
By the start of episode two, the situation in the Situation Room is pretty messed up: two drugged-up fighter pilots (they’ve even taken the wrong drugs – downers instead of uppers) en route to eliminate Pakistan’s nuclear sites have accidentally shot down an Indian surveillance drone. Jack Black is taken prisoner by the Pakistani army. And Walter Larson is having downstairs problems, dribbling painfully on to a urinal cake with the presidential seal on it.
Besides the big names (Black and Robbins also have producer credits) The Brink has a lot going for it: high production values, a fair degree of bite, a solid commitment to vulgarity, and worthy targets. As satire, it’s everything it should be, except funny. The humour, such as it is, derives largely from the notion that the world’s most powerful men behave like adolescent morons behind closed doors. Hence the US secretary of state accuses the Indian foreign minister of a “dick move”. It doesn’t really get any funnier than that.
Humour is, of course, a pretty key element of satire: it buys you goodwill. If the jokes are good, your audience will excuse logical inconsistencies, broad caricature, manifest unfairness or a gnawing feeling that you might be trivialising something important. I’m sure there’s a way to do a funny waterboarding scene, but it’s not the way they do it in The Brink. When there’s nothing worth laughing at, satire’s usual strengths become flaws: every plot development is unlikely, the cynicism underpinning the world view is merely dispiriting, the swearing neither big nor clever. It makes me think: is this what Veep would be like, if Veep wasn’t funny?
I’d like to be able to say The Brink has its heart in the right place, but I’m not sure. Somewhere under all the bile, there’s a hint of admiration for all the cool stuff power brings, and it seems keen to perpetuate the unsophisticated notion that the real problem with US foreign policy is that the people in charge of it are stupid jerks. So I’ll just say that I’m sure the writers had the best of intentions when they took aim at the target, and missed.
The Truth About Superfoods (Channel 4) was always unlikely to satisfy my craving to watch dietary fads get savaged by exasperated experts. If you started off by saying the truth about superfoods is there are no superfoods, you wouldn’t have much a of series. Fronted by Food Unwrapped’s Kate Quilton, this four-parter takes the long way round to reveal the inevitable, starting with an investigation into the claimed benefits of three so-called “superfoods” (I’d like to gird that term with several more sets of inverted commas). Does grapefruit have miraculous weight-loss properties? The short answer is no. The answer presented here is: grapefruit contains a flavinoid that seems to encourage one’s liver to metabolise fat, but you’d have to eat 40 grapefruits in a sitting for anything to happen, and along with it you’d also be consuming a kilo of sugar. So no.
Quilton outed herself as someone who has kale for breakfast “most mornings”, so she might not be well placed to dismiss the popular devotion to superfoods. But maybe this show’s approach is better, gently pointing out that, yes, kale is a superfood in the sense that it contains a lot of vitamins, and compounds that might help delay the onset of macular degeneration, but the jury’s still out on that one.
Whether or not Quilton had to go all the way to a kale festival in Germany and be crowned kale queen to get these points across is another matter, although I did learn that they don’t really consider it a superfood, largely because they cook it for hours in sausage fat. They probably don’t think of it as a breakfast thing, either, but I’ll bet they’re pleased with the extra sales.
