Ryan Murphy has lost the plot with this absurd show
Just as HBO gave us the Perry Mason origin story we never wanted, so Netflix is giving us the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest backstory we never asked for. Producer Ryan Murphy, creator of Glee and American Horror Story, and writer Evan Romansky have taken it upon themselves to rewrite a character who had a perfect, unsullied existence within the confines of a classic film.
Nurse Ratched comes a respectable fifth in the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest movie villains, behind Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, Darth Vader and the Wicked Witch of the West. As played by Louise Fletcher, she was unknowable. In Ratched, set 15 years earlier and with Sarah Paulson in the lead role, it’s all show and tell.
I suppose Netflix are aiming this at a young audience who have never seen the film, and for them it might work. But tonally this is so far removed from the original that it inhabits a different universe. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest reimagined as quirky fun? You got it! The Technicolor palette is more suited to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the costumes make Ratched and her fellow nurses look like they’re modelling Dior. The comic-book violence is as almost as lurid as the set design; a lobotomy performed by means of an ice pick to the eyeball, with accompanying sound effects.
The plot begins with Mildred Ratched arriving unannounced at Lucia State Hospital. She is determined to work there, for reasons that remain mysterious until the end of the first episode, and what Ratched wants, she gets. Jon Jon Briones plays the shifty doctor in charge of the hospital, where he performs experimental treatments and which looks like a very expensive spa hotel. Judy Davis is Nurse Bucket, who vies for supremacy with Ratched, and is one of the best things here.
Paulson’s Ratched is a cartoon villain, coolly bumping people off in episode one, but then becoming softer and – supposedly – more sympathetic as the series draws on. This is less a character arc, more a sense of a drama out of control. Which jars, because the Nurse Ratched we know was all about control. There is no order or sense to the way Paulson behaves.
What to say about the portrayal of mental illness, except that the usually reliable Sophie Okonedo hams it up royally as a character with multiplepersonality disorder? “She’s lost her mind. I think she’s lost several of ’em,” says Nurse Bucket, which just about sums up the show’s subtlety.
What do an artist, a nurse, an IT consultant, a DJ and a road surfacer called Binhead have in common? They are all volunteers for the RNLI, part of an army of more than 5,000 people, and featured in the new series of Saving Lives at Sea (BBC Two).
None of the people rescued in this opening episode were idiots (I’m thinking here of the man in Inside the Bomb Squad, on Channel 4 earlier this week, who found a hand grenade while magnet fishing and decided to take it into his office so he could show it off to colleagues). Rather, they had misjudged the conditions. The series reminds us how quickly something can become dangerous when the sea is involved. In Swanage, two paddle boarders were swept out to sea. Further along the coast, a couple of young men who had attempted to walk around the cliffs at low tide became stranded in a cave.
There was something very British about the paddle boarders’ rescue – the lack of fuss on both sides, with the RNLI offering nice cups of tea. The two women had drifted almost a mile from shore and kept their spirits up by singing songs as they waited patiently for the boat to turn up. Paddle boarding, they concluded, “is definitely harder than it looks”.
It was hard to accept this sort of rescue as high stakes, despite the volunteers explaining how dangerous the water could be. But then came another call-out, in Withernsea, to a fisherman overboard without a life jacket. It’s a small place, and the crew knew him. There was a horrible moment when they spotted an empty life ring floating in the water. The search was eventually called off, and a body was found three weeks later. “The North Sea is a cold, unforgiving monster of a sea,” one of the volunteers said.
There were lighter moments, as when Dave, one of the Blackpool crew, got married. Of course, the pagers went off mid-ceremony. The rest of the crew dashed off to a rescue but decided, wisely, that Dave’s new bride would not be amused if they tried to take him with them.
Ratched ★★
Saving Lives at Sea ★★★