In the end it sort of works. You’re watching a character who knows he shouldn’t really be there, played by a man who knows he shouldn’t really be there. Look at it that way, and perhaps the casting is a stroke of genius.
The show is so well-made and well-edited that it is guaranteed to entertain. The episode really gets going at the end, when the traitors are given their first instructions.
The drama mixes jump scares with pretentious lines from one of Aggie’s books (“The truth is, we need our villains alive and well, because without them we’re left to face ourselves”).
[Matthew Macfadyen] delivers a peach of a performance here – not as Garfield, but as the man who assassinated him. .... Writer Mike Makowsky keeps things smart and succinct, and your attention will never wane. What could have been a fusty historical footnote is a pacy drama infused with humour.
The show is good at skewering LA and its personality types. It also hits the romcom beats by running through the stages in a relationship: introducing two sets of friends and family to each other, the honeymoon phase giving way to little irritations.
Middle-aged women everywhere will quickly buy into the idea of Hawes capably dispatching victims in between taking her HRT tablets and getting exasperated with her lily-livered son. .... Don’t think too hard about it. Just enjoy the ride.
Sometimes it’s nice to settle down in front of something gloriously hammy that requires no brain power. The script, from Debbie Horsfield (Poldark, Cutting It), is almost painfully simple. There is absolutely no danger of you not following the plot. Just admire the hairdos and make this your new guilty pleasure.
