Taking part in Good assessment – James Norton’s baby-swap thriller is mind-bendingly dangerous | Tv

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 properties 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 ravishing location, that teems with preposterous coincidences and plot developments. However it is usually a narrative about forcibly eradicating preschoolers from their dad and mom and exposing them to probably mortal hazard by the hands of a disturbed sociopath. Which, you recognize, isn’t actually my concept of amusing.

Taking part in Good – tailored by Grace Ofori-Attah (Malpractice) from the ebook by JP Delaney, whose novel The Woman Earlier than was additionally changed into 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 little one: current genetic testing on one other boy suggests two untimely infants acquired combined up in a neonatal intensive care unit three years in the past. Though that is extremely unlikely in actuality (and the present’s eventual clarification for the swap is nowhere close to convincing sufficient), it faucets right into a primal concern: 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 posh and interesting moral puzzle that a greater drama may need dug into. However Taking part in Good – if this wasn’t already abundantly clear – is a really dangerous drama.

Somewhat than specializing in the precise swap, we virtually instantly shift right into a schlockier gear as Miles (James McArdle) – Theo’s beginning father – comes a-knocking at Maddie and Pete’s door. It takes roughly three seconds for ear-piercing alarm bells to start out ringing (how on earth did he get their tackle, for starters?). Not that the Rileys can hear them – as an alternative, they pootle off to Miles’s huge cliffside residence, 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 inventive profession for motherhood. All the things concerning the go to – throughout which the {couples} agree they are going to hold their present kids whereas spending time with their beginning 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 methods – a lot 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, in fact, having the trivia of your parenting weaponised towards you’ll be – they don’t precisely do themselves any favours, particularly after they depart a pot of hashish gummies subsequent to Theo on the kitchen desk whereas he attracts. One of many weirdest issues concerning the collection is how readily the Rileys settle for the calls for of Miles, regardless of the very fact he’s laying on the baddy stuff extremely thickly; his pink flags are virtually Bond villain-esque. Pete – together 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 Completely happy 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 dad and mom and at finest manipulated, at worst abused, is nauseating. On the similar time, it’s inconceivable to emotionally make investments when all the things else concerning the present is so infuriatingly ridiculous.

Because the collection 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 method possible. Taking part in Good is clearly unconcerned with interrogating actual human feelings or analyzing what it truly means to be a mum or dad. As a substitute, it’s the worst of contemporary tv: a witless thriller overly reliant on insidious atmosphere and very nice homes.