No running away from the past
SHARP OBJECTS SKY ATLANTIC, TODAY, 9PM
SKY Atlantic has brought some fantastic drama to our screens in the last few years.
Some, inevitably, were more successful than others – the first season of True Detective, for example, was frequently astonishing for its visual presentation and air of brooding menace, if not necessarily its frequently incoherent plot points.
Fortitude never quite lived up to the hype but Big Little Lies was an uncompromising look at misery behind drawn curtains, while there’s no doubt that The Night Of remains arguably the finest drama to appear on a small screen anywhere in the last few years.
I’m not even going to mention Westworld – an initially intriguing idea which quickly gave way to portentous navel-gazing that was never as clever as the producers obviously thought.
So hopes will be high for Sharp Objects (tonight, 9pm), their latest contribution to the Big Drama genre.
Based on the best selling novel by Gillian Flynn, of Gone Girl fame, helmed by Big Little Lie’s director, Jean-Marc Vallee, and starring Amy Adams, it certainly has the kind of line up that immediately marks it out from the competition.
Adams plays a disillusioned reporter (is there any other kind?) sent back to her childhood home in the hard scrabble town of Wind Gap, Missouri, to dig some dirt on the murder of two local girls.
While back in the place she ran away from, she deals with her deranged, spiteful, quite-mad but all powerful mother (played with relish by the great Patricia Clarkson, who is always worth watching), the handsome but grumpy local cop and, of course, she has to confront her own skeletons.
What sounds like a relatively formulaic set-up is elevated by the quality of the writing and with a cast of the quality of Adams and Clarkson, it’s no wonder hopes are high that this could well be the stand-out drama of the summer...
There is a certain theme of unwilling people being forced to return to the place of their youth this evening, because the other eyecatching drama is Stonemouth (RTÉ One, tonight, 10.40pm), the two-part TV adaptation of Iain Banks’s novel of the same name.
Christian Cooke stars as Stewart Gilmore, who goes back to the Scottish fishing village of Stonemouth following a friend’s suicide – which, of course, he doubts was suicide at all.
Ghosts from Gilmore’s past are determined to make him pay for the past transgressions which made him flee the village and anyone who is a fan of the late, great and much lamented Banks will know that nothing is ever quite what it seems...