Playing Nice review: James Norton drama is bland, generic porridge that buries potential for a good human thriller

Children generally is a handful, proper? From The Omen to The Midwich Cuckoos, movie and tv loves to point out the disconnect between dad and mom and progeny. However what if that dynamic was formed, not by some demonic power, however by an obvious administrative error? That’s the query posed by ITV’s new four-part drama, Enjoying Good, which follows two households navigating the overall upending of their home lives.

Pete (James Norton) and Maddie (Niamh Algar) reside a seemingly idyllic life in Cornwall with their younger son Theo. Idyllic, that’s, till they get phrase from the hospital: Theo may not be their organic son. It appears that evidently there was a switch-up throughout his troublesome start, that means that they swapped infants with one other couple, Miles (James McArdle) and Lucy (Jessica Brown Findlay).

“Together with your cooperation we’ll unravel this,” a hospital goon tells the couple. They usually do cooperate – they play good, so to talk – partaking with the opposite household, and agreeing to an association the place all 4 dad and mom are concerned in each youngsters’s lives. However these are uncharted waters, and issues quickly start to disintegrate.

What begins as an elevator pitch to traumatise new dad and mom turns into an examination of wealth and the authorized system. Miles is a few entrepreneurial bigwig, dwelling in an enormous modernist mansion overlooking the ocean (which permits for barbs like “you understand what they are saying about folks in glass homes”), with the assets to battle each the hospital, first, after which the opposite couple. Can he merely bulldoze his means into sole custody of each the boys? Will he destroy Pete and Maddie’s relationship within the course of? Or is that this charismatic bloke with the large home hiding a darker objective?

The truth that the present relies on a novel by JP Delaney, whose books, like The Good Spouse and The Woman Earlier than, have all the time confirmed profitable potboilers, ought to offer you some sense of the place that is going. Whereas the set-up sounds believable and sickening – child mix-ups do occur, occasionally, in hospitals, and have been the supply of documentaries and TV sequence up to now – the present rapidly slips into the thriller style.

The creeping improbability of the storyline should be indicated by the truth that Pete and Maddie are depicted as too poor to problem Miles, regardless of proudly owning and working the trendiest restaurant in Cornwall, and too silly to ever suppose to, you understand, rent a lawyer. As a substitute, the present leans into its narrative daftness to ratchet up the strain.

Just a few years in the past, it appeared just like the homicide thriller is likely to be having a renaissance. Spurred on by Knives Out, the traditional whodunnit – a self-contained, logical case unfolding underneath a detective’s microscope – felt prefer it scratched a psychological itch. However that pattern has been quickly outdated on TV by the rambling, illogical mystery-cum-thriller style, virtually all of that are tailored from bestselling airport books.

It’s not simply Delaney’s work (The Woman Earlier than was additionally tailored for the BBC), however that of different authors like Harlan Coben (Lacking You, Idiot Me As soon as, The Stranger), Liane Moriarty (Massive Little Lies, 9 Good Strangers, Apples By no means Fall), Elin Hildebrand (The Good Couple), Louise Doherty (Apple Tree Yard), Sarah Vaughan (Anatomy of a Scandal), Jean Hanff Korelitz (The Undoing), Celeste Ng (Little Fires In all places)… I might go on.

Someway these exhibits are all aesthetically an identical, regardless of completely different plots and areas. Enjoying Good’s director, Kate Hewitt, and author, Grace Ofori-Attah, relocate the motion from London to the South West, turning the Cornish Riviera right into a seaside idyll to match Monterrey or Nantucket. 

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Every little thing feels shiny and anonymised, even the central couple. Norton – who appears trapped on ITV when, by rights, he ought to be a film star – gives a lacklustre efficiency (“Go lady give us nothing!”), whereas Algar is obtainable little greater than the chance to look frightened (a seemingly contagious situation: Brown Findlay’s Lucy has additionally contracted it). Solely McArdle, because the menacing Miles, appears to be having any enjoyable. “Watch out, be very, very cautious,” he growls in a thick Glaswegian accent that’s at odds with Norton’s intermittent makes an attempt at a Cornish lilt.

As soon as Enjoying Good has drifted from its nightmarish premise into this bland, generic porridge, it loses each its stress and its objective. It’s a disgrace, as a result of there’s a very good human thriller buried in there, in regards to the interpersonal challenges of unriddling an unthinkable scenario. However what we get, as a substitute, is one other whiplash-inducing, overripe shock fest, which privileges handbrake turns over regular dealing with.