After the whole Bonekickers/Spooks Code 9 fiasco, it's with some relief that I report that the BBC have not produced another stinkingly bad piece of drama - just an incredibly mediocre one.
Mutual Friends tries to pick up where Cold Feet left off - a tale of 40somethings brought together by a friend's funeral. It's The Big Chill. It's Peter's Friends. It's a little bit of Manchild and a little bit of Mistresses. You're meant to laugh, then cry, then grow to love this bunch of people.
The thing is - I don't think that's going to happen.
It's not that it's a bad show. It has some nice lines and the performances are mostly good. Alexander Armstrong is, in fact, really engaging as ageing lothario who causes mayhem wherever he goes and the always watchable Marc Warren shows that he can play good guys too (and with considerable aplomb).
As for the rest of the cast, Sarah Alexander hasn't really being given much to do and Keeley Hawes is marginally better than she was in Ashes to Ashes - that is to say, still pretty awful.
And here in lies the problem with Mutual Friends. The casting is too safe, too cowardly. It's the same old faces over again. The same old faces that appear again and again in every BBC drama going. For example, look at the recent mini series Burn Up. Who did we have in it again? Oh yeah, Marc Warren. Who else? Oh yeah, Rupert Penry-Jones from Spooks. And hasn't he just been cast in the new remake of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Now, don't get me wrong, these are both great actors and I've never seen either of them give a bad performance but it's becoming a bit too lazy to just throw them in every single new drama that comes along. And while we're on the subject, wasn't it this sort of lazy, safe casting that ended up screwing ITV's drama output in the 90s?
Cold Feet, for example, created a number of stars but at the outset no-one had ever heard of Helen Baxendale or James Nesbitt. This allowed the actors to inhabit the parts - and the audience to get to know, and ulitmately love, the characters. Here we're just given another load of star performances. I don't see how we're supposed to create any kind of empathy for these characters, believe for one moment in them as people in their own right if they're all overly familiar from half a dozen other recent shows. And I think I could grow to like many of these characters but the 'star' casting is preventing me from doing that.
The other thing that rankles is the terrible soundtrack. That faux latino might have conveyed a sense of kinetic farce five or six years ago but now it's just become another tired cliche.
There's a good series here trying to get out and I'm really hoping it will find itself, discover its own voice and become a hit. It's really refreshing to see the trials and tribulations of someone older than 17 on TV again and there was much in the script that was quirky and fun. As mentioned above, Alexander Armstrong and Marc Warren show a great chemistry together and they pretty much steal the show from all the other characters. My preference would be for the show to go in a more Minder-esque direction and concentrate on the misadventures of these two - the vibe and chemistry between the two is not incomparable to Terry and Arfur, I would say. But failing that, I would at least like to see Marc Warren's character ditch his unpleasant, scheming skank of a wife. Once again, Keeley Hawes seems to have created a character that I've taken an instant dislike to. Maybe it's just the unrepentant way that her character seems to be dealing with her infidelity. So far, all I want is for Warren's character to get as far away from her as possible.
And so, I'm not writing off the show yet. It's got off to an incredibly tame and formulaic start but there's definite potential here. This series could go in interesting directions and become a real fixture of the schedules. But it's going to have to be put some work in for it do so. And the fact that is that it seems to have created many of its own handicaps which is going to make achieving that all the more difficult.
Mutual Friends tries to pick up where Cold Feet left off - a tale of 40somethings brought together by a friend's funeral. It's The Big Chill. It's Peter's Friends. It's a little bit of Manchild and a little bit of Mistresses. You're meant to laugh, then cry, then grow to love this bunch of people.
The thing is - I don't think that's going to happen.
It's not that it's a bad show. It has some nice lines and the performances are mostly good. Alexander Armstrong is, in fact, really engaging as ageing lothario who causes mayhem wherever he goes and the always watchable Marc Warren shows that he can play good guys too (and with considerable aplomb).
As for the rest of the cast, Sarah Alexander hasn't really being given much to do and Keeley Hawes is marginally better than she was in Ashes to Ashes - that is to say, still pretty awful.
And here in lies the problem with Mutual Friends. The casting is too safe, too cowardly. It's the same old faces over again. The same old faces that appear again and again in every BBC drama going. For example, look at the recent mini series Burn Up. Who did we have in it again? Oh yeah, Marc Warren. Who else? Oh yeah, Rupert Penry-Jones from Spooks. And hasn't he just been cast in the new remake of The Thirty-Nine Steps. Now, don't get me wrong, these are both great actors and I've never seen either of them give a bad performance but it's becoming a bit too lazy to just throw them in every single new drama that comes along. And while we're on the subject, wasn't it this sort of lazy, safe casting that ended up screwing ITV's drama output in the 90s?
Cold Feet, for example, created a number of stars but at the outset no-one had ever heard of Helen Baxendale or James Nesbitt. This allowed the actors to inhabit the parts - and the audience to get to know, and ulitmately love, the characters. Here we're just given another load of star performances. I don't see how we're supposed to create any kind of empathy for these characters, believe for one moment in them as people in their own right if they're all overly familiar from half a dozen other recent shows. And I think I could grow to like many of these characters but the 'star' casting is preventing me from doing that.
The other thing that rankles is the terrible soundtrack. That faux latino might have conveyed a sense of kinetic farce five or six years ago but now it's just become another tired cliche.
There's a good series here trying to get out and I'm really hoping it will find itself, discover its own voice and become a hit. It's really refreshing to see the trials and tribulations of someone older than 17 on TV again and there was much in the script that was quirky and fun. As mentioned above, Alexander Armstrong and Marc Warren show a great chemistry together and they pretty much steal the show from all the other characters. My preference would be for the show to go in a more Minder-esque direction and concentrate on the misadventures of these two - the vibe and chemistry between the two is not incomparable to Terry and Arfur, I would say. But failing that, I would at least like to see Marc Warren's character ditch his unpleasant, scheming skank of a wife. Once again, Keeley Hawes seems to have created a character that I've taken an instant dislike to. Maybe it's just the unrepentant way that her character seems to be dealing with her infidelity. So far, all I want is for Warren's character to get as far away from her as possible.
And so, I'm not writing off the show yet. It's got off to an incredibly tame and formulaic start but there's definite potential here. This series could go in interesting directions and become a real fixture of the schedules. But it's going to have to be put some work in for it do so. And the fact that is that it seems to have created many of its own handicaps which is going to make achieving that all the more difficult.
7 comments:
I found this entertaining...not challenging, but entertaining. I don't think we're supposed to like Hawes' Jen so because you don't like the character or "Alex" from "Ashes to Ashes", you don't like the actress?
Completely different characters here and though I happen to love the character of "Alex," I know several men who don't. These are all men who constantly complain about "pushy" women. A2A needed a pushy and funny woman and they got her. "Jen" is not a nice person and Hawes plays it that way.
Nice little performances throughout this though I thought Warren just missed on that last scene with Armstrong.
It's got some promise and I'll be back.
Agree completely about the Keeley-bashing. She's a fine actress and has chosen recently roles of tough women. I guess there's a certain sort of man who finds this uncomfortable and resorts to slagging off her talent.
Hawes has in the past been great. She was, for example, one of the reasons that Spooks got off to such a good start. And she was absolutely excellent in Our Mutual Friend. So, no, I don't automatically dislike her as an actress.
However, I don't think the character of Alex in A2A was particularly well-written so her rather shrill one-note performance can't really be completely blamed on her.
I also realise that Jen is meant to be a more unlikable character than Alex but I do think that the script was still trying to elicit sympathy for her. And I don't think that Keeley quite got it.
And no I don't have a problem with 'pushy women' as you put it. It's just that both these parts require slightly more nuanced performances than Hawes has been giving - despite the fact that she's more than capable of doing so.
Keeley Hawes is a fine actress who I like a lot (she would, for example, be my dream casting as Emma Peel if they decided to have another crack at The Avengers). I just think that her performances in these two shows have not been quite as good as they could have been.
I hate the increasingly rude tone of blogging, especially about TV drama. You wrote that Hawes is " still pretty awful". Which she is not. And then you backtrack like mad when you're accused of sexism.
Agree on the soundtrack, though.
You're talking nonsense. I'm not backtracking on anything. I still think that Hawes's performance was pretty awful but I did want to defend myself against charges that I have something against her as an actress. I stand by everything I said in the original review. It seems to me that it is you who are conveniently playing the sexism card because you don't happen to agree with it. I don't think it really follows that because I disliked a performance by an actress that I'm automatically being sexist for saying so. Are you really saying that actresses shouldn't be criticised in exactly the same terms as their male colleagues?
Having said that, I do regret the slightly abrasive tone of some of the review and were I to do it over again, I would probably write it slightly differently.
I have seen Keeley Awes in two shows - Ashes to Ashes and now Mutual Friends and have concluded that she simply cannot act. She overacts in everything she does. In fact I now recall coming across KH for the first time in a TV film where she married a rich guy and pretended to be someone else. She was awful in that too.
Compare her acting in Mutual friends to that of say Sarah Alexander and you can spot the difference between the subtlety of Alexander and the overacting (all over the top facial expressions) of Hawes.
I find that she ruins every scene she is in.
She has been pretty bad of late but don't write her off completely. She was good in the first couple of seasons of Spooks and I'd definitely recommend you check out the beeb's version of Our Mutual Friend from a few years back. She put in a good performance in that. She was just let down by the cack-handed writing in Ashes to Ashes and as I said I think Mutual Friends is a bit mis (over?) cast
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