Everyone’s laughing at us.
You don’t know that.
I know people. We love humiliation. We can’t not laugh.
So, I decided to finally dive into this British sci-fi/horror/thriller/drama anthology series. It’s a series that is very influenced by The Twilight Zone & The Outer Limits, of course, with a major focus on the role of technology in modern society and in speculative near-future societies. A show like this can be variable and it really rises and falls based on the premise of each individual episode. One of the pleasures is, in my opinion, starting an episode and having literally no idea where it’s going to go; I avoid even reading the one line summaries on each episode on Netflix. I would recommend as well that you go in blind, but for those of you who don’t anticipate watching the show or have already seen it, I will talk a bit about the premise below.
Well, in the premiere episode, a beloved member of the royal family has been kidnapped and in order to secure her safe return, the British Prime Minister must go on live television and . . . well, have sex with a pig. Now, that’s a ******* premise. This episode is elevated by the way the show treats this absurd premise with absolute seriousness. The episode looks fantastic visually, very much like a movie, not a television show. The cast is game for anything and the episode really hangs on the two lead performances which are fantastic. Rory Kinnear is wonderful as the befuddled and unsettled Prime Minister and Lindsay Duncan is great as his icy Home Secretary. Good supporting turns by Anna Wilson-Jones as the PM’s wife and Tim Goodman-Hill as one of the PM’s staff. The episode is genuinely disturbing and dark and the final scene before the credits (hold on, Netflix, don’t skip them, there’s a scene IN the credits as well!) is just really unsettling and painful. It’s a meditation on humiliation and social media and, if its take on some of the themes are a little shopworn, well, it wins points for the bat-**** craziness of the premise. This is a really great episode, very promising, and also just good on its own terms. Far, far better than it has any right to be, really. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – fantastically weird premise, impeccable production values, top notch performances and a grim view of humanity; a great start to this anthology series. 3 ½ stars.