While the conflicted emotional openness of Liverpudlian gangster Michael Kavanagh (James Nelson-Joyce) isn’t the dominant theme of the BBC’s gripping new Sunday night thriller This City is Ours, it is a distinct subplot.
Reunion isn’t an easy watch for a number of reasons – the subject matter is difficult, and the format means full commitment is required. But it is unapologetically itself, and the world it creates is all the more convincing as a result.
Visually, there’s mild trippiness instead of the flat-out derangement demanded by the subject matter. Eventually, the show feels like a lavish curiosity; fun, but with an undertone of missed opportunity. Ultimately, it lacks drama.
Poker Face never dodges reality (and how could it, given its premise?), but it never stumbles under its own weight either. This show is irreverent fun with a big moral heart and a very human sense of chaos and jeopardy, and it never forgets to give us what we need.
Even as the central mystery approaches some sort of resolution, the writing and performances, the perspectives and subjective points of view are compelling enough to leave these stories hanging alluringly. Get Millie Black lives and breathes. This might be a crime thriller, but it isn’t just a crime thriller.
The excellent lead, Lucy Boynton, is equal parts insolent charisma and wary vulnerability, a woman so accustomed to withstanding life’s hard knocks that she finds it difficult to let her guard down under any circumstances. If the story has a moral centre, it is provided by Toby Jones’s John Bickford. Jones is as superb as ever, albeit in the kind of role he’s perhaps in danger of finding himself stuck in for good.
