Debate or window dressing?
To stay relevant in these challenging times, TV has to work pretty hard. James Belfield watches a spy drama that nails it and a dominatrix show that walks a fine line.
When today’s 24-hour news cycle and instant social media commentary is so confrontational, the world of smallscreen entertainment can find it hard to remain relevant.
Truth, in short, is often more hardhitting than fiction, and reality more raw and direct than even the most in-depth documentary.
So when current campaigns around gender equality, privacy, security and civil rights find themselves key to programmes and plotlines, there’s a constant tension between whether those shows are adding to or benefiting the debate, or whether they’re just using some of our world’s toughest social issues as window dressing.
One series that works hard to reflect today’s tough times is Soho’s new sci-fi drama Counterpart.
Sure, a portal into an alternate universe is hardly the #MeToo movement in terms of relevancy, but the show’s gritty, urban landscape; the bureaucratic machinery of a Berlinbased United Nations spy agency; and the oppressive role of government over the individual all create a punchy, all-too-real environment.
It helps hugely that the production values are so polished that when Howard Silk – a lowly agency man somewhat of the mould of 1984’s Winston Smith – comes face-to-face with his alternative self, the viewer isn’t startled by the one-actor-plays-tworoles schtick that can easily derail any suspension of disbelief (how distracting were two Jean Claude Van Dammes in Double Impact or two Christian Bales in The Prestige, for example?).
It also helps that the Orwellian setting and far-fetched plot is peopled by recognisable, rounded characters played by actors at the top of their games: JK Simmons, who won a best supporting actor Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe for his role in 2014’s Whiplash is outstanding in his dual personalities – especially considering quite how different those personalities emerge to be.
The first episode intersperses thrilling, violent action with tense plot development to ensure the complicated yarns of parallel worlds are interwoven without spoiling the Counterpart’s cut-and-thrust of what’s basically a spy drama with heaps of personal baggage. And by using our own anxieties about government control and security to underpin the whole narrative, Counterpart manages to play out its major theme of “what if life were different?”against a slightly queasy reality in which we’re not that trusting of the one life we’ve already got.
At the other end of the spectrum comes Viceland’s Slutever, which is sold as a challenge to “outdated notions of female sexuality, gender, and love” and part of the channel’s “week-long focus on all things female in celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8”.
Presenter Karley Sciortino is a sex writer and vogue.com columnist, whose work is confrontational and honest to the point of bluntness. This week’s first episode deals with “lifestyle slaves” – men who enjoy not only the pain of handing themselves over to a dominatrix for whippings and other assorted humiliations, but who are also prepared to serve their mistress 24-7.
“Pain puppy”, for example, sweeps out his mistress’s rabbit hutch, goes grocery shopping and cleans her dungeon in return for what’s described as a “lifestyle makeover”. He has, it transpires, lost weight and gained friends.
The first two-thirds of this episode do delve into some of the issues raised by bondage and explore the types of people it attracts – as Sciortino puts it “what it’s like torturing someone you see every day as opposed to beating up a random”. It even has time for Dr Zhana Vrangalova, a professor of human sexuality at New York University, to raise the point that “the word slave is a very loaded and intense word” and that, in itself, may be part of the appeal.
Where the show falters in its documentary approach, though, and teeters on the brink of titillation is in the final third when Sciortino (who has written about being a dominatrix before and introduces the show with the question “am I a bitch for wanting” a lifestyle slave?) breaks out the whips and latex and starts to interview for her own pet person.
Certainly, there’s scope to explore the sex industry as part of “a celebration of International Women’s Day”, and there will be many who see Sciortino’s straight-talking arrival on the small screen as a breakthrough for millennial women’s perspectives on sex and sexuality – but there will also, I’m certain, be plenty who feel a quite casual, entertainment-based show on slavery and sex-workers walks a hazardous line.
Counterpart