Ah, a fresh BBC crime drama featuring the too ubiquitous to care about David Tennant (who must be the busiest UK actor around, all those babies to feed) and the always awesome Tucci. Spawn from the mind of a man behind the almost perfect Sherlock series. Yes, please.
And then…no. But four episodes later. The thing with Inside Man is that it thinks it’s cleverer than it is. In fact, it is blatantly obsequiously enamored with its own supposed cleverness. It’s a show that positively fawns over itself. Or maybe a show creator that does. Either way, inside Inside Man is nothing but a bag of cheap tricks, none of which hold up to intellectual scrutiny, logistical or even just critical examination. So, if you use the process of elimination, it just goes to show you who the real brains behind the Sherlock was, out of the Gatiss/Moffat team. This isn’t to say Moffat can’t write. He can. He’s rather clever with zingers and one liners, he can make a dialogue sparkle. But that’s all surface appeal. When you look deeper, it falls apart. His twists are all TA-DA and pizazz, but only so long as you don’t think about them too much. His messages are all askew. He might not actually have a message, he just likes the flash cards with catch words. Take the first episode of this show. It starts with a tense scene on a metro train, seemingly ripped out of #MeToo playbook. In fact, it watches like a #MeToo ad. Women get abused and picked on by a lout who then gets taught a lesson by a brave and plucky Janice Fife. This is all while the Lydia the journalist, a millennial seemingly perfect for raising objections and standing her ground, sits by quietly. However, Lydia is impressed with Janice and follows her out and the two go on to become very tentative friends. So ok, with a first scene that rousing, it seems that Moffat is jumping on the popular band wagon, taking down abusive men, etc., right? Wrong, Very wrong. How do we know this? Well, because afterwards and for the entire duration of the show, women get a pretty rough deal, with Janice getting the roughest deal of all. Moreover, where in Sherlock you had two (differently) charismatic but uniformly charming, awesome, likable protagonists, here most people are quite sh*te. Worst of all, the detective duo with Tucci Sherlocking it in as a criminology professor on death row for savagely murdering his wife and Atkins Estimond’s Dillon Watsoning it as his circumstantial bestie/sounding board/personal recorder due to his photographic memory. Oh and Dillon is also on the death row for savagely murdering 14 or 15 depending on how you count women. And these murders of women are constantly and consistently the butt of a joke between two chummy self-satisfied murderers who are practically cute about it. And then there’s Janice who due to a terrible misunderstanding gets locked up, beaten, tortured and worse in a vicar’s basement. You’d think one would be safe at a vicarage, right? Wrong. Not where there’s child pornography idly lying around on a USB stick. Not when people don’t listen to or trust each other. And then, Tennant – the sexy vicar – a happily married man, a devoted father, goes off the rails completely and drags his family along with him. So, two separate storylines, with Lydia the reporter connecting the two. Because Tucci takes cases to solve inside his prison and his warden indulges him. Mind you, Tucci is a sadistic bastard who likes to drag things out for dramatic effect and his entire game is…pause and wait, so they can see how clever he’s being. But hey, he can’t help it, he’s just written that way. He is nothing but a showcase of Moffat’s limitations. The very first puzzle Tucci’s character (laughably named Grieff) solves is basically a stupid juvenile pun that makes no sense if you think about it for longer than two minutes. Continuing puzzles are much the same. This golden egg is merely gilted. And just wait until you see the convolutions Tucci puts everyone through to find Janice. Something that could have been easily taken care of in so many other simpler ways. Oddly enough, even Janice the victim is made unlikable. She’s meant to be the companion character in a way to Tucci, the Mycroft to his Holmes; someone just as clever if not more but not particularly fond of people. And yet, she is a. too self-righteous to listen, too rigidly inflexible in her morals and b. kind of annoying. She’s also clever, but like Moffat, like this show, gloatingly so. Which makes her genuinely annoying and nowhere near as likable as she should have been. And I’m not one of those people who needs a sociopolitical message in their entertainment. I didn’t need or expect Inside Man to dissect the gender politics for me. So this really isn’t about the representation or depiction of that. This was only ever meant to entertain cleverly. The show’s failure to do so is frustrating, because it comes so close, but consistently backs away, poses, preens, and says “look at me, aren’t I clever?” And no, frustrating resoundingly NO, not as clever as you think, by far. Well written dialogue – yes, genuinely funny at times – yes, well acted – YES, especially a star turn by Moffat’s own son as the vicar son. But for a mystery, a twisting puzzling mystery, it is just not that clever. Sherlock would rip this to shreds. And yet it has the gall to tease the sequel at the end. No, just don’t. Even Tucci considerable charisma can’t carry that. Just get back to doing Sherlock already before Cumberbatch is an old man. Seriously.
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