On the mark with a killer mom
Paul Abbott, who created the British series “Shameless” (subsequently redeveloped for American television) and “State of Play” (subsequently redeveloped as an American movie) is behind the new, six-part “Hit & Miss,” which premieres domestically, in its un-redeveloped original form, Wednesday on DirecTV’s Audience Network. Chloë Sevigny is its star.
Sevigny plays Mia, who, we quickly learn, is a professional killer and a male-tofemale pre-op transsexual. (A post-hit nude scene makes the latter quality graphically clear.) It takes a little longer to realize that she is English, and that we are in Yorkshire.
“You’re like a machine, Mia,” says her fat but only so jolly gangster boss, Eddie (Peter Wright), admiringly. And indeed, she makes her job, killing people without getting caught, seem a relatively clean and easy one, which I guess it might be if you know what you’re doing. In any case, we are to understand that she is unusually good at it, which means that — like that little old methmaker Walter White, when “Breaking Bad” had yet to stomp his moral compass completely to bits — she will have a difficult time getting out.
Abbott and his sole screenwriter, Sean Conway, give her a reason to: Mia suddenly discovers that she has an 11-year-old son; that his mother has died; and that she has been appointed the legal guardian not only of her own unsuspected child (Jorden Bennie), but his three younger and older half-siblings (Karla Crome, Reece Noi and Roma Christensen), some of whom would much rather fend for themselves. Viewers of “Shameless” will recognize that family dynamic, which partially echoes Abbott’s own childhood.
Abbott has said that he had ideas for two pilots sitting on his desk — one about a contract killer, the other about a transgender mother of five — and he merged them like peanut butter and chocolate into a dramatic peanut-butter cup. (That figure is my own.) The premise does seem a little overstuffed at first: She’s a hit man! She’s a hit woman! She’s (overnight) a mom!
Once all this is absorbed, however, it feels remarkably natural. If it takes a scene or two to adjust to Sevigny’s accent, you immediately buy her transitional sexuality. She has a sleepiness to her, a heavy-lidded quality she carries from role to role, that fits the deadened self we first meet but also makes the awakening of a maternal instinct all the more delicate and her moments of panic or temper all the stronger.
But every performance here is good — the young actors are remarkable — and though the script sometimes goes just where you would expect it to, the characters seem authentically unpredictable.
By American standards, there is very little dialogue, and the pace is slow enough to make “Mad Men” look like the Keystone Kops. But things will clearly pick up before we’re done: Mia is both a protective and a dangerous presence among her new brood, which augurs trouble, and it doesn’t take long for the tension to mount.