Poldark slowly sinks in the west – but do we care?
Not long now before we before we bid goodbye to Poldark (BBC One, Sunday) forever – which may come as a relief to many. This fifth series, entertaining as it’s been in parts, has also been the most compelling argument for its demise. Dispensing with Winston Graham’s original novels, it has gone round and round in circles of virtue-signalling (about slavery, the environment, racism, grief, mental illness, the social benefits of education, forced marriages et al) without always bothering to check it was bringing its audience with it. Few people, after all, watch Poldark for its message.
In this episode the Ned Despard (Vincent Regan) storyline finally came to a conclusion with cartloads of treachery, conspiracy, an abortive prison break and oodles of will-they-wont-they last minute suspense on the gallows. In most dramas it’s the bad guys we hope will get dispatched but, frankly, it came as a relief when the hangman kicked the stool out from under this particular agent of universal suffrage and social reform who, over the course of six episodes, had become less a lovable revolutionary rogue and more a monumental pub bore.
Meanwhile, Geoffrey Charles (Freddie Wise) and Cecily Hanson’s (Lily Dodsworth-evans) efforts to subvert George Warleggan’s (Jack Farthing) dastardly plan to force Cecily to marry him, also came to a head. Their romantic dash to Gretna Green was foiled by George’s henchmen, but they hadn’t counted on Cecily being willing to scupper her reputation by lying that she’s already slept with her beau. “You’ll always wonder if her first child is mine or yours,” jibed Geoffrey Charles from the pews, demonstrating a canniness beyond his years. No wonder George, being George, turned on his heel and ran.
That might have been it had Ross, weeping manfully on a Cornish clifftop following Despard’s execution, not been mysteriously boffed on the head and consigned to the bottom of a sinkhole in the closing moments. By whom was not entirely obvious. But it certainly left the door open for a rollicking Ross-focused romp to the final curtain in Poldark’s “last ever” episodes over the coming Bank Holiday weekend. Gerard O’donovan
The blockbuster success of season one of David Fincher’s Mindhunter (Netflix) was a reminder that serial killers never go out of fashion. Fincher had already
directed two of the classics of the genre in Seven and Zodiac. The challenge he faced in his Netflix collaboration was sustaining our grisly fascination with some of history’s most twisted criminals over 10 hours of TV.
He prevailed not by raising the shock factor but dialling it down. There was none of Seven’s apocalyptic gore or Zodiac’s existential dread. Instead, Mindhunter was a compellingly by-the-book portrait of the groundbreaking FBI agents who, through the Seventies and Eighties, pioneered the then-controversial field of criminal profiling.
Fincher and his writers strike the same restrained tone as Netflix’s most anticipated adult drama returns with a gripping and deliciously intricate second series. We rejoin FBI Behavioural Science Unit agents Bill Tench (Holt Mccallany) and Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff), who is recovering from a breakdown after getting a little too deeply inside the head of “Co-ed Killer” Ed Kemper. The rogues’ gallery is expanded in season two, where star billing goes to the incarcerated Charles Manson. He is depicted as a cackling latter-day Rasputin by Damon Herriman. We are also reintroduced to Kemper (Cameron Britton) and BTK – for “Bind, Torture, Kill” – murderer Dennis Rader (Sonny Valicenti).
Unlike skin-crawling pseudo horrors such as Seven, Zodiac and Silence of the Lambs, a 10-part drama cannot live on sickening killings alone. So Mindhunter carves out space for Tench’s troubled home life. And the entrenched sexism of big institutions in the Eighties is touched upon as Ford and Tench’s criminal psychologist colleague Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) is sidelined by the FBI’S gung-ho boss.
Mindhunter’s most impressive accomplishment is to weave an engrossing mystery without trivialising these real-life killers. The series fascinates rather than unsettles. Yet the picture it paints of Manson, Rader and the rest is never glib. It’s a remarkable achievement and one of those rare “binge-watch” shows that lives up to the billing. You really will want to snaffle it down in one sitting.