Thoughts on McMafia

The BBC’s production is not ground breaking, it is not the greatest thing you have ever seen – in fact we have seen something like it before The Night Manager starring Tom Hiddleston for one. Yet there is a magnetism and charisma about the entire production, not so much about being proud of itself but you know you are watching a programme that is top quality from acting to writing to care of location scouting to costume design.

Undoubtedly, the show rests on the still relatively young shoulders of James Norton, who gets the leading role as Alex Godman – the hedge fund manager who is a legitimate businessman, yet the son of a Russian family that had to leave the motherland following a turf war involving a rival gang.

The necessity of giving Alex an ambiguous surname is one that works into the hands of the viewer – is Alex a good man or merely a God amongst men – he must follow an unfamiliar path for BBC protagonists and one more familiar to American crime shows; like Walter White, he is a good or nice man to begin with, but our hero must endure some pain and suffering changing his natural persona of one from wholesomeness to one of malevolence.

Alex goes through traumas of becoming distant from his fiancée, forcing her to leave the house they share; he talks more Russian as the season progresses (Ep. 6) as he slowly morphs into the head of the household as his father becomes more frail and reliant on alcohol.  

While the production is in love with the cities it visits from the sub-continental warmth of India to the glamour of Israel; you also admire the coldness of Eastern Europe of Prague and Moscow; to the sheen of West London.  The show makes great pains to say this series is as much about the attachment to family as our attachment to money and power; money can come and go, yet family will remain and the ties that bind will be stronger than bonds in banks. 

Vadim (Merab Ninidze - brilliant) struggles with the daughter wanting to leave Russia for education, they are filmed joined at the hip on long walks mirroring Alex and Rebecca’s union – Benes (the Czech fixer) tells Alex they will attack the one you love most for Alex this is Rebecca and for Vadim it is his daughter; the loss of one will break the other.  Harm, though, still hits Rebecca despite Alex’s attempts to remove her from the frame.

The ending of the series, left this viewer, in a state of part confusion, part frustration as the series morphed from hopefully a standalone series of unique stature to one that is merely the beginning of another series with hallmarks of The Godfather coming to the fore; with Alex becoming a Michael Corleone surrogate and Rebecca very much the Kay Adams/Diane Keaton role; one that may or may not keep Alex grounded in reality as he becomes the head of a new Mafia organisation.

The series makes this succinct point; money makes the world go round - there will be human cost and tragedy throughout; but the old traditional way of doing 'mafia' business has changed in this new technological age, computers and business acumen hold the key to breaking new ground in new territories and regions.  Someone will die and someone will profit from such deaths.

McMafia is available on the BBC iPlayer now and on DVD for Home Entertainment to keep

Television in 2018

A new year brings the promise of new resolutions, promises and the belief that this year will be the better than the last. This belief extends to the arts from cinema to music, painting to sculpture. But never more so than in television, is the leap made clearer than in television where channels propel new stellar productions to the forefront of the schedules in the hope for recognition and ratings.

From the return of stalwart shows Silent Witness to the BBC One and Vera to ITV, to the return of actors in new shows like Kiri on Channel Four starring Sarah Lancashire in a post-Happy Valley world to the high concept Hard Sun on BBC One.

There are changes a plenty not just in terms of the shows structure but how we watch them.  Last year the water-cooler show was Doctor Foster, the five-part second series was must-see television for one night a week showing the demand for such shows to get people talking about it the next day or immediately on Twitter and social media.

Hard Sun is an interesting case; a thriller with dystopian tendencies predicting the sun to explode in five years causing the end of our planet and how dealing with this world-ending event puts things into perspective. Yet the show premiered on a Saturday night at 9.30pm, with all six episodes of the series available on BBC iPlayer at once in a box set to allow viewers to watch the next episode immediately if they so wished.  The BBC attempted this at the tail end of last year with Gunpowder with relative success. The Corporation looks to be changing its ways with that of the audience needs and wants in the current climate.

McMafia is the stand-out show on offer though from British television. Reminiscent of The Night Manager, featuring a breakthrough role for a young British star to translate to the worldwide audience in a story with global reach wearing its expense on its sleeve. 

McMafia is an eight-part series which had a two-part show over New Year's Day holiday to entice the audience; it now sits at 9pm on Sunday for the water cooler effect.

Whilst it does not have the sheer wow factor of Tom Hiddleston's stab at a James Bond audition coupled with the telling adaptation of John Le Carre's source material, James Norton does embody the role of Alex Godman (has there ever been a more egotistical name) with relative ease sashaying from one suit to a tuxedo and jet to yacht as travel of choice; the supporting cast help with the reality of the world falling around him. The Night Manager had a glamorous cast of characters, whereas the Godman family and their rivals look more experienced at life and feel the pain and ache of having to leave their beloved Russia in exile.

As an audition for Bond, we have not yet seen Norton do necessarily atypical Bond things apart from fend off a choke-hold and wear a suit really well; whereas Daniel Craig has a ice-cold steeliness when he plays Bond, Norton has a somewhat laid back feel when he is smiling that would not translate to the iconic role of 007; but that does do a disservice to what he has done in three episodes of Alex - slowly he is getting warn down by the world he is step by step entering, becoming less and less of an investment banker and more an international money launderer to save his family's name and reputation, the hope being they can return to Russia.

Next of Kin began on ITV on Monday 8th January, a six-part global drama featuring a mixed-race marriage and the abduction of a British-Indian doctor in Pakistan against the backdrop of a terrorist attack in London.  Featuring a cast of talented actors, the series paints a multi-diverse London correctly but looks at well to do people in terms of class structure; both siblings are doctors, the female doctor's husband works with the government.

And that perhaps may be the one criticism of all these shows is that it focuses on middle-class individuals and not the problems that beset the working class population around the country. With all the series mentioned set predominantly in our capital city, London, there is a myopic window of the world being served to a licence-paying audience.

Kiri (Channel 4) is set around Bristol and deals with the sensitive issues of a mixed-race adoption and social services, written by Jack Thorne, it may well harken back to a gritty social realism more in common with Ken Loach and Alan Clarke than anything served up by the BBC in recent years; even Gunpowder is about upset middle class rebels wanting to blow up upper class people because they are against their policies.

It is indicative that the most socially political aware programme is based around characters outside of London; a city that is afraid to acknowledge people near the poverty line, whereas other cities do not have a problem with this awareness.

National Treasure

No, this is not a telling re-examination of the Nicolas Cage/Jerry Bruckheimer film from the early 2000s but a review of the DVD release of the Channel 4 drama National Treasure originally screened in early September starring Robbie Coltrane, Julie Walters and Andrea Riseborough.

The drama tells the fictious story of Paul Kingsley (Coltrane) an ageing television comedy legend who has to contend with an accusation of rape from over 20 years previously. Whilst happily married to his wife Mari (Walters), Kingsley has a sexual appetite as depicted by his affairs with prostitutes yet this has never succumbed to under age girls as he is accused of.  Kingsley fears he is being portrayed as Jimmy Saville, the spectre and recent history of Operation Yewtree hovers over this production as a very dark cloud.

This cloud is embellished by the visual hue of the cinematography which is very dark greys and blues with the camera lurking behind corners and doorways not showing us everything fully until a character calls another directly bringing them into eyelines.

The drama is played with amazing panache by its three leads and is generously helped by key supporting player, Tim McInnery (Blackadder) as Finchley's comedy partner. Andrea Riseborough  as the broken and troubled daughter, Dee who we first meet in a halfway house being threatened with losing custody of her children and having driven her car through the accuser's house, Dee's descent into periods of madness will stay with you.

Yet it is the steady sterling presence of Julie Walters who is the star of the show, a performance of such reach and depth she puts everyone else firmly in her shadow. Her presence as a rock to Paul is very much absent by the series end.

The drama is very of the moment and in years to come may rescind into memory but it is great to see a brave production painting its narrative stars as very much that, a star who uses his talent and influence.

The script by Jack Thorne of Made in England fame had an opportunity to make a statement on star power and celebrity influence instead it singles out the women who accuse celebrities as hungry for fame themselves and to quote Mari, end up destroyed in the witness box and hard to believe.

National Treasure is released on Home Entertainment on Monday 31st October.

The Night Manager

The BBC have brought to the small screen in their 'Pure Drama' field an updated and altered John le Carre adaptation to fill up our Sunday evenings for the next six weeks.

The novel, The Night Manager, was released in 1993 and set in Cairo; the adaptation by David Farr (Spooks) has been updated to January 2011 in the same city during the now famous Arab Spring.  We encounter a white British man, Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston - all charm and confidence) walking through the battered backstreets of the Egyptian capital as revolution takes place.

At work, he is suave and debonair, breezily dealing with rocket attacks on his hotel as international guests attempt to flee the city.  That night he meets a mistress of a renowned family man, Freddie Hamid; she is Sophie, a middle Eastern jewel. They flirt and they inevitably sleep together, she imparts upon Pine some information relating to the Hamid family buying weapons and munitions from renowned wicked man, Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie). Sophie calls Roper, 'the worst man in the world'.

Pine fears for Sophie's wellbeing after giving this information to a delegate at the British embassy, Simon (Russell Tovey) who hands it on to a bitter worker of the International Enforcement Agency in Victoria, London; Angela Burr (Olivia Colman), who is seemingly at loggerheads with MI6 in how to capture Roper and his machavellian ways of trade and commerce.

Pine's fears are realised when Sophie is killed in her hotel room, this leads to a fast forward to four years later where Pine has relocated to Zermatt, Switzerland at the Meiseters Hotel in the Alps over the Christmas period. The hotel is expecting a late arrival of guests, namely Roper and his entourage including a fay Tom Hollander as Roper's dogsbody.

Pine sees this as a chance to help the UK government entrap Roper and so contacts Burr who comes to Zermatt personally to meet up, and so begins their mission to get Roper.

If this all sounds so BBC, so British and so Bond; you would not be wrong with that assumption. The film (and it is a film, under the guise of a television series) is directed by Suzanne Bier and she does well to shoot a sense of place from the sweaty humidity of Cairo, to the juxtaposition of a freezing London office with no heating ending with the picture postcard beauty of the Alpine landscape.

This can be construed as one long James Bond audition for Hiddleston, who does well with his calm moments and allows Pine moments of sensitivity and naturalness, such as throwing up after checking Roper into his room.  Yet being an ex-soldier who served in Iraq, he knows how war works and how it affects you; Pine is self-effacing and ready for a challenge, the way he gets the sim cards from Roper's phones is both ingenious and smart.

This is event television the like of which the BBC has strained for a number of years, but it shows that to gain that event status of a high water mark series you need the perfect storm of three actors (Hiddleston, Colman, Laurie) at the apex of their careers, a stellar supporting unit of familiar BBC faces (Hollander and Tovey), a renowned internationally acclaimed director (Bier). And the story, it is always about the story. The combination of le Carre, the BBC and Hiddleston makes this a drama not to miss.

Shetland; Series 3, Episode 3

Following the climatic death of Ciaran Hinds, Michael Maguire, at the end of episode 2, and following a two week absence due to the BBC's FA Cup coverage, Shetland returned to these shores with more intrigue and drama.

In episode 3, Jimmy Perez (Douglas Henshall) and Tosh goes to Glasgow to investigate why Michael Maguire's witness protection identity was kept from him and his team on the island.

Back on the island, Sandy goes door to door looking for answers to the identity of who helped the shooter getaway after driving to Maguire's location.  This leads to Sandy attempting to confront his partner's cousin, Craig, who we know was on the ferry the night Robbie Monroe disappeared.

The trip to Glasgow allows Archie Punjabi as Asha Israni to speak at last as Maguire's handler, and her deliberate motion of avoiding questions in the interview with Perez leads to a rendez-vous in his hotel and eventual romatic clinch which will know doubt lead to something he regrets.

The connection between Robbie and Michael is further established when not only do they have matching tattoos, they are father and son which leads us to further understand that Michael did not kill his son on the ferry.

Perez was shown to have a vengeful streak also when he encounters the person Maguire was going to inform on, O'Malley played chillingly. O'Malley promises "he can get inside your life, get inside your head" during a confrontation in a dive bar. This prompts Perez to beat up one of O'Malley's heavies in the car park. This leads to the romantic clinch with Asha.

The episode ends with an onimous looking figure burning some evidence in a field, we only see his shadow, is it Craig doing more work to cover up his mistakes or doing what he is told?

This episode at times did drag but the injection of the father-son bond between Maguire and Robbie means there is more than meets the eye, and whilst the clinch between Perez and Asha was a bit telegraphed you get the sense it was building up to something greater. So another four star episode for this reviewer.

In praise of...Breaking Bad

Last night, I had the pleasure of completing my first box set. Breaking Bad. It has taken just about five weeks but me and my girlfriend, have witnessed countless deaths, numerous cooks and shady dealings in Alburqueque. We have followed the transformation of high school Chemistry teacher Walter White from fighting lung cancer to the horrific Heisenberg, the empire builder who would stop at nothing to get what he wants.

Oddly enough, when the conclusion of series 5 first aired in America on AMC I avoided any spoilers as best I could, thankfully the Internet community found it necessary not to ruin it for non-watchers as it is something best experienced first hand, much like The Mousetrap.

The ending was to me a complete finite ending deserving of the legacy that Vince Gilligan and his team have created.  Usually when series come to a finish, it is perhaps two series past its sell by date or the characters have outstayed their time.

Breaking Bad was good because it did not take a series as  the same temporal period for the viewer, for example, the original audience did not witness a White family Christmas when they did. The action started in series one around Walt's 50th birthday and ended a day after his 52nd, therefore the condensing of all the narrative action in to a timeframe of five years served a greater reality to the drama; things change dramatically from day to day in our lives, so why can that not be reflected in our viewing pleasure?

A lot has been made of the writing by Gilligan and his writers, yet while the show has been rightly heralded as the perfect amalgamation of talent, special mention must go to the acting of Bryan Cranston and the ensemble who infused all the characters with not just a belief but a humanity not seen before in American television drama. Whereas, characters in the West Wing or The Sopranos, where highly stylised versions of political and gangster conventions, in Breaking Bad these were actual people doing what comes naturally to survive and exist.

Yet that was the appeal and motivation for Walter to begin with. We meet a man on his 50th birthday, who feels unfulfilled in his life. A teacher who is not respected, mocked by his alpha male brother in law who works for the DEA. Had things been different for him he would have been a CEO of a Fortune500 company, yet fate dealt him a bad hand seemingly, and he cancer diagnosis leads him to reassess his options. His lack of insurance coverage means his family will be bankrupt should he die, so he attempts to cook Crystal meth and get close to the $700,000 he requires for the medical bills and pay his disabled son through College in his absence.

In the final episode, when Walter and his wife Skylar talk for the last time, she believes he will say he did it all for the family. Yet he surprises her by saying he did it for himself and he liked doing it. That was a good line to have Walter say, as the series has predominantly been about pride and the things people do when their ego is out of control. And it was this battle of wills sometimes between Walter and Jesse. I say sometimes as too often Walter seemingly got away with his malicious acts of violence, in contrast to the mindset of Jesse who has seen too much bloodshed and wanted to avoid it as best he could.

The story would ask if it was possible to avoid violence, or if it was the only course of action with say the murder of Gus in the nursing home.  It would also make you root for the villain as Walter slowly became one, and made you root for Hank and Mike who were oddly purveyors of justice and attempted to make you get the bad guy.  Through the last series, you were still rooting for Walter until he crossed the line of domestic violence in the episode containing Hank's death, that was the act that made you want to get caught, or die and ultimately the act that made him leave New Mexico and go into hiding.

I saw an interview with Gilligan, where he said his writers stole from the best in reference to their ending matching The Searchers. I think they also stole from The Godfather, in that Walter is similar
to Michael Corleone played by Al Pacino; a man so vastly different from that young idealistic soldier,
that he is almost unrecognisable. Yet the way in which he slips into the skin of malevolence and murder is the most unsettling aspect of it all. Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Mario Puzo's novel was as a watershed moment in American film history, as is Breaking Bad in American television history.

Is Walter the devil or just a bad man, I believe he was not a changed man, he was a man who learnt a lot about himself and became a version of himself he did not know was possible nor capable of such acts. How do we know what we are capable of doing until we do it the first time?

Breaking Bad is as close to the perfection people have envisioned in this box set culture. A show that was brilliantly written, wonderfully acted and produced week in, week out not missing a beat and containing surprise that kept you gripped throughout without going for cheap way outs and belittling the audience it treated with intelligence and respect.  The ending was as close to perfect to, because it tied up all the loose ends with a sense of gravitas and humanity befitting a show about living and dealing with your own mortality.

The Mentalist DVD review

Patrick Jane returns to DVD in the third season of the CBS crowd puller about a quasi-famous psychic who helps the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI).  Jane playing with typical wave of charisma by the suave Simon Baker (The Devil Wears Prada).  He has a track record for pinpointing the perp using razor sharp skills of psychological observation and body language analysis.

The show follows a familiar trend of police procedural; a crime is commited, Jane appears with his senior agent Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney - House) who takes the heat for Jane's non-protocol behaviour.  Lisbon's initial refusal to work with a non-officer has slowly relented to include him in the cases more and more as he is able to crack more complex cases due to his unusual abilities.

The strength and lineage of Patrick Jane can be traced all the way back to the creation of Sherlock Holmes, the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a character who led many people it seemed down a darkened path before finding the light and the answers seemingly on a hunch, but really displaying major abilities of deduction.  Jane like Holmes was also able to seek an answer from a witness/prisoner just by watching their physical behaviour and a look in their eye.

Critically, I would say the better the episodes are when Patrick Jane is left out of the loop and we the better audience are ahead of him as in the 'Red John' episodes, too often Jane can look smug and arrogant as a character who knows perhaps too much and suspects everyone.  Also the glorification of the rich and their lifestyle give the majority of the plotlines, whilst other police procedurals do not mind looking at the lowlifes.
In the same vein clearly as the Tim Roth vehicle 'Lie to Me' but with a second string cast; and along the same set up as 'Castle' which features Nathan Filion (Firefly, Serenity) as a crime novelist suffering writer's block who helps police officers with their cases.  Whilst not original by using a main character as anti-authority who is then used by said authority to help their deficiency in doing the job properly, the series now in its third season is nonetheless entertaining helped by the engaging performances and high production values.

Released by Warner Home Video on 10th October for £39.99RRP for the five disc set.  Extras include deleted scenes; a portrait of Red John - the serial killer and key recurring character and a featurette on 'Red Moon' directed by Simon Baker.