The narcissistic Millennial never looked so self-aware
Based on the bestselling memoir by 33-year-old journalist Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love (BBC One) begins with the caveat that parts of the show are “fictionalised when life didn’t offer a good enough story”. But for many women under the age of 35, this tender, comic and wincingly accurate portrayal of navigating love, friendship and your early twenties in London will feel like anything but fiction. It’s not often we Millennials are allowed to feel nostalgic, but it’s almost impossible to finish Everything I Know About Love without having sent a barrage of Whatsapps to old friends and flatmates, each beginning: “Remember when…?”
Twenty-four-year-old friends Maggie, Birdy, Nell and Amara have just moved into their first home, in Camden, where they use any excuse – a new job, a lost job – to open a bottle of wine on a Monday and spend hours practising dance routines in mismatched pyjamas before snuggling in bed together (though wishing Maggie would wear pants). And while most of their conversations revolve around boys – from disaster dates to boyfriends who use up too much water – the love story at the heart of this story has nothing to do with them.
Instead, it’s about Maggie (Alderton) and her oldest friend Birdy. Maggie (played with dollops of charisma by rising star Emma Appleton) is the fun one. An aspiring writer who lands a dream job story-producing for a reality TV show (as Alderton herself did on Made in Chelsea) she’s always chasing a party, even if that means hailing a black cab from London to Liverpool in the early hours of the morning.
Meanwhile Birdy (an adorable Bel Powley) is the sensible one: she makes a Powerpoint presentation for an interview for a counter job at John Lewis and has a meltdown when the salmon platter she bought as a “future heirloom” is used for lines of cocaine. But they are perfect for each other: Birdy tirelessly peels Maggie out of sticky situations while Maggie encourages Birdy to be a little braver. So when Birdy falls in love and decides to move in with her boyfriend, Maggie experiences her first real heartbreak.
Television is awash with middleclass white women wreaking havoc on their perfectly nice lives after too many glasses of chardonnay (hello, Sally Rooney), and some may roll their eyes at Maggie’s privilege and narcissism. But Alderton (who also created the show) has always been a wryly self-deprecating writer and her obvious self-awareness keeps this love letter to female friendship as charming as her memoir. Eleanor Halls
It helps to know that We Own This City (Sky Atlantic) is based on a true story. Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force was a police unit mired in corruption. Its officers considered themselves untouchable. Journalist Justin Fenton chronicled their rise and fall in the book on which this series is based; our review said that it made The Wire “look tame by comparison”.
We are in the same territory covered by The Wire, and We Own This City is by screenwriter David Simon (so too The Wire and again in collaboration with George Pelecanos here). Think of it as a companion piece, although it bears more resemblance to The Shield.
In the opening episode, a uniformed officer smashes a bottle out of an old guy’s hand. It’s a blunt way of showing that the cops are the bad guys here. At the centre of episode one is an attention-grabbing performance from Jon Bernthal as Wayne Jenkins, all swaggering machismo. The task force gets results – guns off the streets and out of the hands of drug dealers – and Jenkins cultivates a rock star aura. “I was born to do this s--t,” he brags.
So the subject matter is dramatically engaging, but the confines of a six-episode series do the show no favours. The Wire was often referred to as being Dickensian in detail and scope, whereas We Own This City
focuses on one story and boils the characters down to their essence. Perhaps feeling the need to complicate this straightforward job, Simon and Pelecanos play with the timelines, cutting between the years in a way that feels unnecessarily confusing.
These are minor gripes. The show is most successful in explaining why this unit was allowed to get away with it for so long. A prosecutor asks why the most sadistic officer, Daniel Hersl (Josh Charles), is still working despite a record of violence against suspects. “Hersl and guys like him – they get out of their cars and they make arrests,” comes the answer. In a city once described as “a poster child for the basic failure to stop lawlessness”, another character explains: “If we’re going to police the right way, we’re not going to police at all.” Anita Singh
Everything I Know About Love ★★★★
We Own This City ★★★★