Nothing like a murder to warm cold winter nights
The Undoing, Sky Atlantic’s new murder drama, comes with an impeccable pedigree. Created by David E Kelley, who gave us everything from Ally McBeal to Boston Legal to Chicago Hope and Big Little Lies, is the writer, and it is directed by Susanne Bier, who also helmed one of the best miniseries of the last decade, BBC1’s The Night Manager.
Add in Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant in the lead roles, and Edgar Ramirez as a dogged detective, and it would be almost impossible to disappoint.
And so it proved in the opening episode. Grant and Kidman are Jonathan and Grace Fraser, a wealthy Manhattan couple. He is an oncologist, she the psychotherapist daughter of a multi-millionaire (Donald Sutherland in a walk-on part, at least for now). Their jobs pay for a lavish lifestyle, one that allows them send their son Henry to the Reardon School, where the fees are $50,000 a year.
Grace is on the fundraising committee, and there meets Elena Alves, the mother of a boy attending on a scholarship. Elena is mysterious, and soon develops a fascination with Grace, parading naked in front of her in the gym and kissing her in a lift after tearily admitting to feeling lost and out of her depth among the champagne and canapés set.
The next day, Elena is found murdered and when the police call to talk to Grace, they seem more than a little interested in Jonathan’s movements the previous night. He had left the party to attend to a young cancer patient, then travelled to Cleveland for an appointment. When Grace calls him to tell him of the tragedy, she realises he has left his phone at home in the bedside locker. As she rings every hotel in Cleveland, she cannot track him down. Why not? Well, we have to wait until tomorrow to find out. Mercifully, Sky has decided to drop its policy of releasing all six episodes at once and it’s lovely to have a proper cliff-hanger to deal with, and for a series to unravel at its own pace.
I’ve never been a fan of box sets. There always seems to be too much pressure to watch the next episode straight away, because we all know someone else who binge-watches and is only too happy to reveal the whodunnit long before we even find out what exactly was done.
It certainly is easy, though, to believe Grant has some sort of double life. He’s a little too aloof, a little too superficially charming, to be entirely trustworthy, and his glib responses to everything – told he must attend the fundraiser, he says ‘slurp, sob, dread, despair’, which seemed pretty much peak Grant – have him marked out. The source material for this is a novel called You Should Have Known, and I’m taking that as a message to Grace the therapist. Not least, it must be said, because in an early scene, she berates a patient for trying on 20 pairs of shoes before buying one pair, but doing no due diligence at all on the three men the woman married.
Grant is in very familiar territory here, somewhere between Charles in Four Weddings and Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones, and in the first episode at least hadn’t got a lot to do beyond being Hugh Grant. All the dramatic heft was left to Kidman, who is excellent. She can be glacial when needed, but you always feel like there’s a layer of ice on top of a volcano that could erupt at any time.
Perhaps because we have become so used to her alabaster features, she can convey almost any feeling with the flutter of an eye or the curl of a lip, and there seems little doubt there will be many of both actions as the series progresses. The Undoing is warmly welcome – something meaty for dark, cold winter nights is just what the doctor ordered, though there is one element that ends up being fairly depressing, namely a New York teeming with the chaos of street life.
When you see recent pictures from its dejected, abandoned heart, you could cry at the comparison.
That said, clutter is not always welcome. On Thursday, we met breast cancer survivor Sinéad and her daughter Jodie. Often overwhelmed by tiredness following her treatment, Sinéad had allowed her conservatory became a dumping ground. Dashing to the Home Rescue were architect and designer Róisín Murphy and builder Peter Finn. There’s no Dermot Bannon miracle here, no atrium, no mezzanine, no kitchen presses with recessed handles.
Instead, the house just was completely tidied up with the help of Sinéad’s family and friends, an oldfashioned internal double door was removed to improve the flow through the house, and everywhere was painted.
Throw in a slightly gussied-up garden, and three days’ work might just as well have been three weeks, given how different the house was at the end of it all.
The shrieks of delight from young Jodie, who has been her mum’s ally all through the illness, were brilliant, and it made for a lovely half hour of television. Inspirational too. I promised in the first lockdown I’d declutter and paint a few rooms in my own house, but it didn’t happen. Just before this lockdown, I bought the paint. Having seen what Róisín and Peter achieved, I have no excuses left.
Wish me luck.