The Secrets She Keeps

The Secrets She Keeps certainly has a bit of a Lifetime movie feel to it, but the leads bring more than enough credibility to their roles to make the series worth watching.

Without performances as layered and emotionally sound as the ones Carmichael and De Gouw give, The Secrets She Keeps would be little more than the aforementioned pulpy ride. It’s still pretty cockamamie, but in a way that is also fully believable.

As Meghan, the first-rate Ms. De Gouw is overshadowed by Ms. Carmichael, who not only has the meatier and more complicated performance to deliver but is far better known, at least in the U.S.

“The Secrets She Keeps” is well-acted and tightly woven, but the broader points it aspires to make about maternal desire as social capital and motherhood as performance end up overshadowed.

Take what you have learned from The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, through the aforementioned Gone Girl, put more recent memories of The Victim (that one with Kelly Macdonald), The Replacement (that one with Morven Christie and Vicky McClure) in order, stir in scraps from any story you have seen or read with a lost baby at its heart and you are away. Half your work is done and you are free to kick back and enjoy the non-plot elements.

Although this series is trashy and I don't believe in a single character, I'm finding it surprisingly moreish. This is 99 per cent down to Laura Carmichael (Lady Edith in Downton Abbey), who plays with heart the downtrodden Agatha, living in a basement flat, stacking supermarket shelves and clearly unhinged.