Show + tell with Paul Flynn
ROBYN IS A PR at the type of swishy London firm that keeps dirty celebrities clean and powders off their profile with some edge when they’re too straight. She’s a high-flying account executive. Explaining the industry to Melody, her poor beleaguered intern, she says, ‘Just assume that everybody is lying.’
The PR gig is filled with subterfuge, neuroses, glamour, deception, scandal, sex, narcotics and even occasionally crime. Yet it’s a world that is only rarely foraged for TV, perhaps because PRS are conduits to the stars, so not stars themselves. Furthermore, since Jennifer Saunders mined its ludicrous outer reaches to dazzling effect with Absolutely Fabulous everyone thought, why bother?
A whole generation has passed since Ab Fab. The PR kingdom is no longer drowning in Lacroix, liposuction and Lulu. It’s COS, celebrity chefs and closeted footballers. It’s the cash-happy, wisdomstarved fame incubated by reality TV and online influencers. It’s peopled by Patsy and Edina’s slightly more uptight, less caricatured understudies. This is Robyn’s world in Flack, a promising new comedydrama, which opens with a chemsex resuscitation and barely lets up afterwards.
Robyn is played resolutely, slyly straight by the brilliant Anna Paquin, a lost New Yorker in the city. She has recognisable, grown up and very London problems. She’s married to her job 24/7, unable to fully domesticate and harbouring a coke habit. She obliges her monstrous boss (a fantastically vile Sophie Okonedo) and finds it way too easy strategising amoral solutions to the problems of celebrities with plenty of cash and no self-awareness.
Flack feels less like a sibling of Ab Fab, more a distant cousin of the high-stakes, human interest, office drama of The Good Wife. It has a sterner grip on both the nervousness of the celebrity canon and the tenacity of their handlers than last year’s divorce lawyer drama, The Split, which covered some similar turf. It has something of that whip-smart, post Sex And The City humour fault-line, where you’re allowed to land a joke about Chris Brown, so long as the right person delivers it. Whether you like Paquin’s Robyn is neither here nor there. I recognised at least half a dozen friends and associates in her. For this season at least, The Devil Wears PR.
The crazy world of PR is lampooned in Flack, which is like the older, more sinister, street-wise sister to Ab Fab