The overtly ludicrous TV thriller has its place. Generally it’s enjoyable to throw all logic and sense to the wind and give up to a bananas plot whose twists and turns – which play out amid large, aspirationally spotless houses and beautiful vistas – are so entertaining and hilariously camp that you find yourself glued to the display. Sadly, Taking part in Good doesn’t match this mould. Sure, it’s a frantically tense drama, set in a gorgeous location, that teems with preposterous coincidences and plot developments. However it’s also a narrative about forcibly eradicating preschoolers from their mother and father and exposing them to probably mortal hazard by the hands of a disturbed sociopath. Which, you realize, isn’t actually my concept of fun.
Taking part in Good – tailored by Grace Ofori-Attah (Malpractice) from the e-book by JP Delaney, whose novel The Lady Earlier than was additionally became a disappointing BBC drama – does have a compelling ethical conundrum at its core. The Rileys – restaurateur-chef Maddie (Niamh Algar), stay-at-home dad Pete (James Norton, slipping out and in of a surprisingly high-pitched Cornish accent) and their son Theo – are an image of down-to-earth familial pleasure. Till, that’s, the hospital telephones to tell them that Theo isn’t their organic youngster: latest genetic testing on one other boy suggests two untimely infants received blended up in a neonatal intensive care unit three years in the past. Though that is extremely unlikely in actuality (and the present’s eventual rationalization for the swap is nowhere close to convincing sufficient), it faucets right into a primal worry: which new mom semi-delirious with exhaustion on the postnatal ward hasn’t fleetingly feared such a state of affairs? And the upshot – that two {couples} every really feel a deep-seated connection in the direction of each kids – is a fancy and interesting moral puzzle that a greater drama might need dug into. However Taking part in Good – if this wasn’t already abundantly clear – is a really dangerous drama.
Slightly than specializing in the precise swap, we virtually instantly shift right into a schlockier gear as Miles (James McArdle) – Theo’s start father – comes a-knocking at Maddie and Pete’s door. It takes roughly three seconds for ear-piercing alarm bells to begin ringing (how on earth did he get their deal with, for starters?). Not that the Rileys can hear them – as a substitute, they pootle off to Miles’s monumental cliffside house, which he shares with David, the Rileys’ organic son, and his virtually silent spouse Lucy (Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay), who gave up a profitable creative profession for motherhood. All the things in regards to the go to – throughout which the {couples} agree they may maintain their present kids whereas spending time with their start sons – is deeply sinister, from Miles’ insistence that Lucy not drink to the way in which a nanny whisks the boys away on the earliest alternative. Miles is clearly a harmful, controlling bully who desires Theo all to himself, and shortly he’s using all method of soiled tips – lots of them mind-bendingly ridiculous – to get him, as astoundingly gullible professionals observe his leads.
Whereas the following motion is nightmarish for Pete and Maddie – as, after all, having the trivia of your parenting weaponised in opposition to you’ll be – they don’t precisely do themselves any favours, particularly after they go away a pot of hashish gummies subsequent to Theo on the kitchen desk whereas he attracts. One of many weirdest issues in regards to the sequence is how readily the Rileys settle for the calls for of Miles, regardless of the actual fact he’s laying on the baddy stuff extremely thickly; his pink flags are virtually Bond villain-esque. Pete – along with his beanie and scraggy windswept aesthetic – is supposed to be the beta good man in distinction to Miles’s alpha sociopathy, however he simply comes throughout as spineless and silly. For all his heinous flaws, I couldn’t assist lacking Norton’s Comfortable Valley monster Tommy Lee Royce, who would at the very least have had the wherewithal to play Miles at his personal recreation.
The truth that Taking part in Good is a farcical melodrama coiled round an inherently upsetting premise makes it an disagreeable but hole watch. Dread is baked into the subject material; the prospect of kids being faraway from loving mother and father and at greatest manipulated, at worst abused, is nauseating. On the identical time, it’s not possible to emotionally make investments when all the pieces else in regards to the present is so infuriatingly ridiculous.
Because the sequence builds to a guffaw-inducing finale, some questions are answered, others are left hanging, and the first narrative is resolved in essentially the most asinine means conceivable. Taking part in Good is clearly unconcerned with interrogating actual human feelings or inspecting what it truly means to be a mum or dad. As an alternative, it’s the worst of contemporary tv: a witless thriller overly reliant on insidious atmosphere and very nice homes.