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Lately, big movie stars have come to “prestige” TV in ambitious projects, but with mixed results. For every Big Little Lies or True Detective Season 1, there’s a Yellowstone or True Detective Season 2. Hugh Grant takes his turn with the Amazon miniseries A Very English Scandal. Will he be successful?
A VERY ENGLISH SCANDAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: We see the graphic “Based on a true story,” then a shot of the Houses of Parliament, with the graphic “London, 1965”. Cut to a well-appointed dining room. The graphic says “House of Commons Dining Room.” A well-dressed man motions another over and they both start talking in haughty accents.
The Gist: MP Jeremy Thorpe (Hugh Grant) talks to his fellow member of the House of Commons Peter Bessell (Alex Jennings) about the prospects of Thorpe becoming leader of the Liberal party, as well as Bessell’s sexual appetites. When Bessell tells Thorpe he has, in desperate times, partaken in “the spear end,” Thorpe finds the opportunity to confide in him.
Thorpe’s mother Ursula (Patricia Hodge) received the news from a former “friend” of his, Norman Josiffe (Ben Whishaw). Why is he telling Bessell about it? We flash back four years; Thorpe is staying at the estate of another “friend,” and he meets Norman, who’s working as a young stable boy. He is attracted to Norman and tells him to come to the House of Commons if he ever needs anything. A few months later, having left his stable boy job and spent some time in a psychiatric hospital, he does.
He needs a new National Health Service card, which he left back at his old residence, and needs Thorpe’s help. Thorpe eventually finds him a room to stay in and their affair begins. But after a year, he can’t deal with Norman’s instability and sends him off, without the NHS card.
Norman goes off to Ireland and becomes a model, getting involved in all sorts of drugs. In 1968, after hitting rock bottom, he calls Thorpe’s new wife and threatens to expose their affair if he doesn’t get his NHS card. He then goes to the police with the love letters Thorpe wrote him, though he only hands over a couple of them.
Thorpe dispatches Bessell to Dublin to warn off Norman, and in the process, finds out that Norman lost his suitcase with the letters in it. After finding and destroying them, he feels that the only way to keep Norman (now with the last name of Cook) from derailing his rise to Prime Minister is to kill him.
Our Take: Even if you don’t know much about the Thorpe scandal (and we found out a lot after reading Meghan O’Keefe’s excellent primer on it), just seeing the names associated with A Very English Scandal would be compelling enough to put it on your Prime watchlist. Grant and Whishaw are joined by screenwriter Russell T. Davies (Doctor Who, Torchwood) and director Stephen Frears (The Queen, Florence Foster Jenkins, Dangerous Liaisons) to make a miniseries that’s cinematic in scope, has flashbacks within flashbacks, traverses a long timeline, and somehow makes complete sense.
The performances from Whishaw and especially Grant help this along. We all know that Hugh Grant has outgrown his “handsome cad” and “handsome bumbling romantic lead” roles of the ’90s and ’00s, but he really disappears into Thorpe, playing him as a dismissive snob, a rising Liberal star, and a guy who wants the country’s anti-gay sodomy laws eradicated while having no desire to be outed himself. You get the officiousness, the fear, and the ambitiousness in his performance.
Whishaw plays Josiffe/Cook as a guy who projects a weak constitution, but who in reality is pretty tough. He has no problem being out in a society that thinks homosexuality is a crime, and he is relentless coming after Thorpe. Bessell actually admires him, saying “He tells the truth and he doesn’t care. No one else does that, Jeremy. No one, certainly not us.”
Sex and Skin: After settling Norman in at his mother’s house, Thorpe starts making out with him, then puts a jar of Vaseline on the table. He then officiously instructs Norman to get up on all fours.
Parting Shot: Thorpe comes to the conclusion that he needs to have Norman killed. “There is only one way for us to survive. Norman Scott has got to die. So how?”
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Sleeper Star: Naomi Battrick has a small part as Diana Stainton, Bessell’s assistant who retrieves Norman’s bag from the train station after it’s lost. She fights Thorpe all the way as he tries to get the evidence against him that’s in the bag, while her mission is simply to get the bag back to its owner.
Most Pilot-y Line: “You have infected me, Jeremy! With the virus of homosexuality!” — Norman as he leaves Jeremy after their affair goes poof. Understandable line, given the times, but still clinks on the ear a bit.
Our Call: Stream It. It’ll be three hours well spent. In the next two episodes, we’ll likely see the attempt on Norman’s life and the trial after everything goes awry. It’ll be fun to see what comes next.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.
