How I See It

When it comes to crime drama, whodunnit isn’t always the right question

When I wrote in this space, last November, that I was “very much enjoying Stephen Merchant’s new comedydrama The Outlaws on BBC One”, I didn’t tell you the whole truth. That programme was compromised for me and I didn’t admit it.

A couple of weeks in, I had seen Stephen Merchant’s face on the cover of a magazine. The strapline was: STEPHEN MERCHANT’S NEW SERIES, AND THE CHALLENGE OF PLAYING A SERIAL KILLER.

I was furious at the spoiler.

This was such a surprise reveal, such an unexpected punch in the gut, that I obviously wanted to discover it at its natural point in the story arc – the moment the writers intended. What a moronic thing to put on a magazine cover before a denouement had aired! I hate spoilers.

Nevertheless, I was blown away by the brilliance of the twist. The series involved a group of convicted criminals doing community service; week by week we learnt the historic details of their misdemeanours (drug deals, gangland warfare, minor violence). Stephen Merchant’s character was a mild-mannered accountant, done for some kind of white-collar fraud, easily manipulated by the more fiendish brains around him. How clever, gradually to reveal that unbeknownst even to the judge who’d sentenced him, never mind his co-crooks at boot camp, Merchant was secretly the worst kind of villain there is.

I didn’t mention it in my column because I didn’t want to spoil your own experience of the series. I didn’t even mention it to the person who watched the series with me, an anonymous media source who loves a thriller and hates it when I speculate aloud during old Poirots.

I did the decent thing and nursed this twist quietly in my breast as

The Outlaws unfolded.

Reflecting silently with my advance knowledge, I thought they should do more to sow the seed. They shouldn’t give it away but plant the odd hint, for viewers to remember when they looked back post-reveal. Something that would prove retrospectively satisfying, to help us think, “The clues were there all along!” But there was none. Merchant’s character betrayed no trace of his bloodthirsty secret.

And then it ended and he wasn’t a serial killer at all. He was just an accountant! So, for me, the lack of twist was a massive twist. That headline was referring to something else completely.

It was talking about Four Lives, which wasn’t out yet (but is now, on BBC One and iPlayer). In Four Lives, Stephen Merchant openly plays a serial killer, the real-life killer Stephen Port who murdered young men he picked up on the internet. It’s not a whodunnit. We know whodunnit. Stephenportdunnit. So THE CHALLENGE OF PLAYING A SERIAL KILLER wasn’t a spoiler, it just happened to be plastered all over a front page while Stephen Merchant was playing a mysterious criminal in something else.

Doh!

Naturally, I had to make good on all this by actually watching Four Lives. Luckily it’s brilliant. It’s properly enjoyable, in a way that programmes about serial killers usually aren’t, in my opinion. It’s hard to explain why it’s so engaging – it’s about something awful, its mise-en-scène is as grim as its emotional weight, and we know whodunnit – but I really looked forward to each new episode, just as I would if it were about something jolly.

A lot of this comes down to the performances: all terrific. And I mean all terrific, with such a uniformity of terrificness that you know it must have been very well directed. Stephen Merchant reveals an astonishing range of acting nuance, like a conjuror whisking the cloak off a flock of doves, and Sheridan Smith will win awards as the bereaved mother, but really everyone’s performance is perfect, from Rufus Jones as a decent bystander to Michael Jibson as a useless policeman to Memet

Ali Alabora as Smith’s adoring, struggling, heroic second husband.

The genius of the show, helped along by this wonderful cast, is the scale of what it portrays, in terms of the human condition. Its power lies in its depiction of powerlessness.

Four Lives pulls focus back from its murders in quite a familiar modern style – revealing the nittygritty of family tragedy, as crime shows tend to these days – but then pulls back further to reveal a story of police incompetence that’s quite breathtaking, especially considering that the real-life inquests only concluded a month ago.

And then it pulls back again, to depict with agonising freshness and conviction what it actually feels like to come up against injustice from authority. This is the exquisite frustration, the enormous fear, the ghastly vertigo that has been felt by pretty much everyone in the world – not to this degree, but you will know the principle of that feeling, whether you’ve been punished by a sadistic schoolteacher for something you didn’t do, refused a doctor’s appointment for yourself or an elderly parent when you know damn well there’s something wrong, told your desperate toddler can’t use the loo by some nasty little hitler in a posh restaurant where you didn’t have lunch, or actually, God forbid, arrested for a crime you didn’t commit. Against a backdrop of this past year, with the slamming of doors on freedom, the unprecedented horror of people being told they could not enter hospitals where loved ones were dying, and authoritarianism on the rise at every turn, it has a bite which is almost unbearable.

This move from the specific to the general, from the current to the eternal, is novelistic in its scope. We understand these families’ suffering through the prism of our own experience, tiny and huge and all across society. It’s a truly great programme.

Against a backdrop of this past year, its bite is almost too much to bear

Pitch perfect: Sheridan Smith plays a grieving mother in Four Lives