Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The miniseries National Treasure shares only its name with the 2004 film where Nicholas Cage steals the Constitution. Like lots of British releases these days—National Treasure premiered on Channel 4 last year and began streaming on Hulu this week—the project reunites veterans of J.K. Rowling‘s unofficial employment agency. Stars Robbie Coltrane and Julie Walters appeared together in seven Harry Potter films (as Hagrid and Molly Weasley, respectively). Writer Jack Thorne penned “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a play that opened on the West End on July 30 and was published the next day (it will cross the pond to Broadway in Spring 2018; I have some thoughts).
Though it is a work of fiction, National Treasure is not set in a fantasyland of sorting hats and Quidditch, instead taking place in a world like ours, where white men can sexually assault women and still win Oscars and presidencies. For 35 years, Paul Finchley (Coltrane and Trystan Gravelle) was half of an admired comedy duo. Soon after we meet him, he’s accused of raping a waitress decades earlier. When the story makes the papers, six more women accuse Finchley of sexual assault, most of whom drop their cases. He is eventually tried for the rape and three sexual assault of a minor counts put forth by his daughter’s former babysitter.
American audiences will draw parallels between Finchley and Bill Cosby; at the year’s end, the I Spy and The Cosby Show lead faced sexual abuse allegations from 57 women, per The Guardian, attacks they claim occurred between the early 1970s and 2008 (New York magazine interviewed 35 of the accusers). Thorne told The Guardian that his inspiration came from Operation Yewtree, a London police investigation that began in October 2012 and unearthed sexual misconduct allegations made against several public figures, including the late English DJ Jimmy Savile, Australian musician Rolf Harris, English TV host Stuart Hall, and Bronx-born-British TV host Paul Gambaccini, a quartet referenced in National Treasure.
Finchley remains mostly stoic, going from famous to infamous and back in the four-part series. The allegations don’t upset him enough to skip parties or stay off the radio, although he does break down in the shower. The women in his family, meanwhile, grow and change throughout National Treasure, thus they are more compelling to watch. Aware of Finchley’s many affairs, his wife, Marie (Walters), initially calls the babysitter “a fantastist” and “stupid girl” before ultimately telling her husband moments before his testimony, “I think you did it.” Their grown daughter, Dee (Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)‘s Andrea Riseborough) was struggling plenty before her father was charged. A survivor of suicide attempts and former drug addict living in a halfway house (without custody of her two children), Dee starts out suspicious toward her father, even wondering if he molested her as a child, a thought her mother squelches (Marie is very good at criticizing Dee when she’s her most vulnerable). Dee had once idolized the babysitter, who lit her first cigarette. But when Finchley, long standoffish, visits her and confesses in great detail how he was sexually-abused as a child and attempted an overdose at 13, Dee softens and asks to move back in with her parents.
While there are flashbacks to Finchley as a younger man, viewers see little from his career. We’re forced to take Thorne and director Marc Munden on their word that Finchley was a comedic genius. The rape accusation comes minutes into episode one; thereafter the doorbell equals doom. His fall resonates less because we’re never shown his rise. A romance that develops between Marie and Finchley’s former partner, Karl Jenkins (Tim McInnerny) is predictable, and the defense lawyers are predictably ruthless (more than one person lies on the stand). Yet watching how a father’s transgressions impact his child, physically and mentally, always makes for compelling drama. Ideally, each episode would have opened and ended with Dee.
Mid-scene, each of the main characters glance over and watch mini-narratives starring a younger version of themselves—Finchley even injures himself chasing the less-gray man he once was. However, the most stutter-causing action is no illusion: Dee’s car crash in episode two is absolutely mystifying in context. At the hospital, Marie tells Dee’s son that his mom is no longer “sleeping.” “She wasn’t sleeping, she was in a coma,” he says. It’s a simple line that reveals everything we need to about Mrs. Paul Finchley: whereas her daughter had alcohol and drugs, she swallowed euphemisms to get by.
