After a long plodding slog in the dark it’s a delight to be dazzled by Nicole Kidman
Aidan Smith discovers that rare TV treat at Halloween – a psychological thriller with real, actual thrills
There are more than a few dramas in my TV planner which carry the stigma of a little blue train barely getting out of the station – a telltale mark left on the shows which couldn’t cut it, not even in lockdown. Unloved and abandoned, with no care for whether the protagonists lived or died, won the prize or got the girl, they’re in danger of being jettisoned completely.
But I make it to the end of The Sister. I don’t know how because when Nathan ( Russell Tovey) shouts out, “I want this to stop, I want it to be over, I want my life back!” these are my feelings, too.
It’s a ghost story for Halloween which moves incredibly slowly. So slowly, in fact, that you’ll think it began way back on 31 October last year. The same places are visited interminably: Nathan’s house, Bob’s cowp, the woods where the body is buried. When the action, if you can call it that, is indoors, no one bothers to turn on a light.
Normally this stuff infuriates me but The Sister is on ITV. According to a just- published survey, if we watch this channel we stay on the train longer than when tuned elsewhere, with 80 per cent of the dramas viewed to conclusion.
Is ITV especially clever at keeping us in suspenders or are we especially supine when it’s the old third button? I thought we were supposed to snort at the clunkiness of stories building to revelations with swelling music and anxious expressions every time an ad break is required? Maybe ask Bob about that.
He tries to explain the unexplainable as a professor of the paranormal. He’s popular on a radio station where Nathan works. Bob is played by Bertie Carvel – completely unrecognisable from Doctor Foster in a ludicrous Fagin wig and even more ludicrous Catweazle croak. He’s a ghost fanatic, a would- be ghost whisperer and, frankly, a ghost bore.
At a New Year party Bob
and Nathan get in tow with a girl but the night ends in tragedy. Racked with guilt, Nathan decides his best option is to marry her sister. Yes, really. Obviously this is a condensed version of events but The Sister needs some serious hurrying along. The men agree never to meet again but of course ten years later, when it’s particularly dark and stormy, Bob turns up at Nathan’s door.
What is their relationship? Who did what that fateful night? Where are the bloody light switches? But never mind all that, though, for Nathan, yet again, is sitting slumped in the low- ceilinged gloom saying nothing while staring at the 457 photographs of the dead girl lining his walls. He’s only been given the entire, stripped- out week to decide what to do next. In your own time, mate.
A bit more happens in the other new psychological thriller, The Undoing ( Sky Atlantic). How can it not when the setting is New York? This is the city that never sleeps, never sits slumped in the low- ceilinged gloom, saying nothing. Early on a yummy mummy rams the point home: “It’s a crime here not to be frantically busy.”
The yummiest mummy of them all is Nicole Kidman as Grace Fraser, who strides through Manhattan’s Upper West Side with her flat white to- go, snow on the sidewalks, big yellow taxis cruising, preRaphaelite curls bouncing. How can this possibly fail?
The show had been announced by a lascivious continuity- wifey as
“your new TV obsession”. I’m certainly obsessed with the apartments, the furniture, the wardrobes which are not so much walk- in as yomp- around and the crimson walls of Grace’s place ( What is that shade? Economy Mince or Engorged Baboon?). Everything is gorgeous, especially Grace. Seconds apart, a friend confirms she looks “fabulous” and her husband Jonathan ( Hugh Grant) avers: “You’re hot!”
The Undoing’s showrunner is David E Kelley, who wrote Big Little Lies and there are similarities. Kidman, for one, and also the existence of a coven of lip- glossed bitchiness at the school gates into which a nervous newcomer seeks acceptance. Grace is a psychotherapist with a nice line in pithy humour, telling the over- controlling half of a gay couple: “You’re Michael- managing again.” Another client complains of an abusive husband and for a moment you wonder if the Big Little Lies remedy might be offered: shoving the problem off a balcony.
This doesn’t happen but there is a murder and it’s the new mum – a strange one, this, flaunting her naked self at Grace in the gym before kissing her – who meets a brutal end.
Incredibly, the first episode ends with Grant’s character a suspect. He’s an oncologist so we see him tending terminally ill kids. We see him, basically, being Hugh Grant: all bluff and blundering and cynically Old World about Big Apple brashness. Surely it cannot be him!
Finally, chess. I know what you’re thinking: the drama cupboard must be bare in the wake of Covid halting production. Well, The Queen’s Gambit ( Netflix) is quietly terrific. It’s based on a book by Walter Tevis who spun many tales for the movies including The Hustler and The Man Who Fell to Earth and follows a child prodigy ( Anya Taylor- Joy, but first Isla Johnston) from an orphanage basement to grand masterdom. The janitor teaches her the game; all that was on offer from my jannie was a fag at break- time.