Best friends return to small screen
DOLL & EM Sky Atlantic, 10.10pm
JUST as the DVD of Ewan McGregor’s latest film, the Australian crime drama, Son of a Gun, goes on sale, he crops up on the small screen tonight in a cameo role.
The cameo has him playing a sleazier version of himself: he chances upon Dolly (Dolly Wells) in a bar and switches on the charm. Before long, they have repaired to somewhere more intimate. “I knew you were a writer,” he tells her urgently. “You’ve got writer’s hands.”
Doll & Em features real-life friends Dolly Wells and Emily Mortimer. They play exaggerated versions of themselves, with Emily hiring her best friend Dolly to be her assistant. When the show started last year, its makers, HBO, said Mortimer’s hiring of her friend “blurred the lines between their personal and professional relationship with hilariously painful results”. They haven’t been entirely wrong – you could almost ask, given its formidable track record, when is HBO ever wrong?
The show, which recently embarked on its second season, has found favour with critics, who speak of its accurate observation of female friendship and its sharp ear for dialogue.
Tonight’s episode, incidentally, re-unites, in a sense, McGregor and Mortimer, who starred together in the 2003 film Young Adam.
As rehearsals for the off-Broadway play starring Olivia Wilde and Evan Rachel Wood continue, Dolly and Emily become baffled by the girls’ interpretation that the characters, based on Doll and Em, share more than a platonic relationship. Olivia pays her an unexpected and decidedly off-beat late-night call to do extra research into her role.
Then Emily is offered a film role that will take her away from the play, resulting in a rise in tension between the friends.
Mortimer’s relationship with Wells strikes you as being very real.
As Mortimer said: “There are very few people in the world who you can be your worst self in front of, and they’re completely vital to survival ... Doll and I have always had that with each other.
“That’s how our relationship worked, making each other laugh by sharing the worst things that went on in our heads.”