The Listeners

From its subtle opening to the explosive final episode, this is a truly great piece of television: after all, there’s nothing more powerful than being heard.

At the series’ core is a deeply felt performance from Rebecca Hall. .... “The Listeners” is more cinematically expressive than most television fare; it creates a mood as much as it tells a story, and finds creative ways to depict characters losing contact with external reality.

The only besetting flaw in the tale is that there is so much loving attention lavished on Claire and her unravelling that the other characters can feel underdeveloped. .... It’s a loud bum note in a thoughtful, thought-provoking drama otherwise full of nuance and put together with surpassing care and delicacy.

An intriguing, ominous and slightly woo-woo four-parter.

The Listeners is finally a show in which big ideas and stupid plot contrivances intersect and often fail to resolve, a jumble of ambitions and flaws that Hall is frequently required to carry single-handedly. That she succeeds makes the series worth watching.

Its saving graces are Prasanna Puwanarajah and Mia Tharia as Claire’s husband and daughter, Paul and Ashley. While Claire drifts off into a world of hallucinatory oddness, these two keep the drama grounded by behaving exactly as normal people would in this situation – which is to treat Claire with sympathy at first, and then as if she’s gone completely nuts.

Titillating and abstract by nature, with a tragic conclusion to boot, The Listeners ultimately ends up like the allegory at its center: Didactic and forgettable.