Author: Ralph Jones

NME

Films don’t come much bigger than Alex Garland’s latest. With Civil War, the writer and director behind movies like Ex Machina and Men has walked onto a larger and more prominent stage than ever before. Being both noted studio A24’s most expensive project to date and Garland’s most explicitly political, Civil War was always going to be hard to ignore. Does it hold up to the scrutiny?

The film views the chaos of a contemporary internal conflict in the United States through the eyes of journalists and photojournalists, not necessarily a profession considered particularly exciting in the pantheon of war cinema. Kirsten Dunst, who plays war photographer Lee Miller, leads the gang of scrappy reporters – who include Cailee Spaeny as a photographer just starting out, and Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson as grizzled journalists – on a surely fatal road trip from New York to Washington D.C., where the President (Nick Offerman) is soon to be violently deposed by the ‘Western Alliance’.

As the quartet try to survive on the road, they have nervy encounters galore with armed strangers of all kinds. Garland handles these often horrible collisions expertly, the stand-off with Jesse Plemons’ gun-wielding psychopath proving the most haunting. The dialogue is believable, the acting is impeccable, and Garland knows how to get your pulse racing. There are some beautiful moments – sparks dancing in a burning forest – and not a second of boredom.

In his promotion of the film, Garland has talked about wanting to celebrate journalists. In an age of both dwindling media funding and mistrust of journalists (intertwined problems, of course), this is an admirable goal for a filmmaker. There is a danger, however, that this story glamourises them a little too much, presenting them as unstoppable, almost fearless beacons of truth. Garland knows how to humanise his characters, and none of the quartet is perfect, but it can feel as though the director wants you to leave the cinema thinking that photojournalism is the most noble of all wartime vocations. The soldiers who frequently allow the gang to follow them into the most extraordinarily dangerous situations never seem to find them irritating, despite their buzzing around like flies and the harsh truth that the images might not find much of an audience in such a bloodbath.

These quibbles aside, Civil War is something of a staggering achievement of spectacle and sound, with vast swathes of the US convincingly up in smoke. Not once do we get the foul whiff of CGI; not once are we taken out of the engrossing reality of the protagonists.
While Garland may have ruffled feathers during press for the film, saying that it is “fucking idiotic” to say that ideological arguments over politics are about “good and bad”, the film is too well-made to polarise opinion in this way. In the long run this neutrality may prevent it from being truly loved, or becoming anyone’s favourite film. But there is absolutely no doubt that it is a triumphant achievement by a director truly hitting his stride.

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It’s unusual for such a well-known actor but some of Jenna Coleman’s self-taped auditions are available on YouTube. Looking back with the benefit of more than a decade’s hindsight, you can see that Coleman would always have been hard to ignore. Filming in plain rooms with a friend – not a casting director – behind the camera, she commands attention; cries at the drop of a hat; she is someone you would want to spend time with. She looks like ‘making it’ was always inevitable.

Although the 37-year-old’s ascent was bumpier than this, she is now a reliable presence on our screens, and her auditions are either unnecessary or performed to famous directors. You’re most likely to know her cherubic face and big eyes from Doctor Who, in which Coleman played Matt Smith’s ‘companion’ Clara Oswald – or more recently, hit streaming shows The Sandman and Wilderness. If you’re an Emmerdale devotee, you’ll know that she did a long stint on the soap as Jasmine Thomas, starting at the age of 19 and hanging on until she was 24 – about 180 years in soap time.

Coleman has been grafting for a long while. Putting in the hours is in her blood. Her grandfather, who lives in her home town of Blackpool, still goes every day to the promenade, where he takes charge of the hoopla and darts. He’s 86 years old. If Coleman has worked hard to get to where she is, it’s easy to see why.

“I’ve done a lot of brooding, interior, tense anxiety pieces”

She can’t remember when her last interview was, she says as she sits down in a café in Islington Green, north London, wearing a chunky navy jumper on a sunny but cold day. Free now from the restrictions of the actors strike that forbade any self-promotion, she can talk about Jackdaw, her latest film. At the moment her hair is ombre – brown gradually giving way to blonde at the bottom – though everything about her is usually dark: her hair and her eyebrows and her eyes. She is fantastic company and there’s a toughness to her answers. At the end of her sentences a slightly guarded pause often hangs, rather than the padding or laughter with which we sometimes try to fill silences when we are excitable and nervous.

In Jackdaw, her character Bo is a street-wise leader of an all-girl biker gang. She doesn’t have a huge deal of screen time but she is central to the life of Jack Dawson (Oliver Jackson-Cohen, also her co-star in Wilderness), the protagonist who races around in almost every frame of the film trying to find his kidnapped brother. A remnant of Jack’s life before he joined the army, Bo is a lifeline, an old flame, and a reminder of who Jack was. Although Coleman has forgotten, Bo wields a shotgun in the film, shooting someone’s testicles through a letterbox – not something you could say of either Clara Oswald or Queen Victoria (whom Coleman played in the ITV series Victoria).

As Jackdaw is set in the north-east of England, Bo – full first name Boudicea – was also a chance for Coleman to flex her Geordie twang. Her accents have confidently toured the British Isles over the last couple of decades and many of her YouTube self-tapes feature an American accent – Coleman went to LA for their pilot seasons many years ago and impressed casting directors but didn’t land a show. (She did, however, manage to play an American character in Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011.) She had just been speaking in a Welsh accent for the Prime Video’s Wilderness when she joined Jackdaw. To nail the Geordie accent, Coleman’s dialect coach Daniele Lydon advised she focus on the phrase “Jean Paul Gaultier’s photocopier” to practise. The phrase doesn’t crop up in the film, which is a shame.

Jackdaw is written and directed by Jamie Childs, whom Coleman met when he directed some of The Sandman, the Netflix fantasy series based on Neil Gaiman’s comic book. Bo is another serious, pretty dark character for her to have inhabited, leaving precious room for laughs. In a similar vein tonally there is The Jetty, a four-part drama series coming to the BBC in September, in which she plays a detective looking back at her life through the prism of a case. In Wilderness she played a woman planning to kill her husband, and in The Cry – a four-episode BBC One show from 2018 – she played someone whose baby disappears. “I feel like I’ve definitely done my time of thrillers and murderers,” Coleman says. “My time of murdering and… thrilling? is done.”

She may be feeling a frustration similar to that which she felt before she landed Victoria, when people only saw her in northern and soap-shaped boxes. “Sometimes it can take a bit of time for people to see you in a different light,” she says, pointing out that before playing a queen she was only ever considered for the below-stairs roles in Downton Abbey. In recent years she has played a spate of characters who are “very held and very introspective”. She looks to actors like Emily Watson, Ruth Wilson and Andrea Riseborough for inspiration; these are women who have played rich, varied and complex parts. She is on the lookout for “emotionally liberated” characters. “I kind of want someone who’s a bit more immediate, I think. I’ve done a lot of brooding, interior, tense anxiety pieces.” The irony is that the more of these she does, the more of them she’s sent. Why? Because she’s good.

Perhaps she might like to do more comedy? Coleman lights up. “I keep telling my agent I’m really funny. But I don’t think she’s quite taken it on board yet. I would love to do some more comedy. I love dark comedy.” Though no one would call it a comedy, The Sandman gives her the chance to have a bit more fun, playing a Cockney exorcist whose voice, she says, is basically a Ray Winstone impression. (“I seem to have arrived at that decision. I’m not quite sure where that came from, but I committed.”) She was recently in the (very) dark comedy-thriller Klokkenluider, which made for a welcome change. Her friend is taking comedy improv classes in London and it has clearly got her cogs whirring.

“I keep telling my agent I’m really funny. But I don’t think she’s quite taken it on board yet”

Coleman has known for about 25 years that acting is the life for her but her first forays were a little eccentric. At Arnold School in Blackpool she was taught drama by Colin Snell, the director of the department, who encouraged the students to perform productions on tour and for three weeks consecutively at the Edinburgh Fringe, where they would essentially be singing for their supper. “I’m not sure she would have gone into acting had we not done what we had done at school,” Snell tells NME. The department put on mounted six to eight shows a year. For one, in which Coleman played someone who couldn’t see, Snell suggested that she volunteer in a home for blind people. “She was quite focused and serious about what she was doing,” he says. At 14 she “chose a lane” and stopped dancing because theatre was taking over, and because she could see that dancers had shorter careers.

Snell remembers her being one of many committed students. (The school has also produced actors like Heartstopper’s Joe Locke and Jonas Armstong, who played Robin Hood in the mid-noughties BBC series). “I don’t think she ever really believed in herself when we first started,” he says. “She was never one that was boastful or talked of ever wanting to be famous. She didn’t have star quality. Star quality is a media invention. She worked hard. She still is quite modest, I think. You never see pictures of her in the papers, falling out of taxis, legs akimbo at four o’clock in the morning.”

Any illusion that Coleman was on a fast track to success was dispelled when she didn’t get into drama school. She worked for a year in a pub. Then, when she was with an extras agency called Scream Management, she remembers getting two pieces of potential work: an audition for Irn Bru and a workshop for the character that would go on to become Emmerdale’s Jasmine Thomas. For the next five years she didn’t need to worry about work. Three years after Jasmine, Coleman became Clara. “Your life’s gonna change, your life’s gonna change,” Matt Smith told her. She had become a central face in one of the world’s most popular TV shows.

Much as her life did change, Coleman is currently at a level of fame that sits comfortably with her. Cabbies always recognise her. When people stop her for selfies it tends to be for Doctor Who, Victoria or The Serpent, a massive hit during lockdown. There was a bit of an “unreality” to the hysterical Comic Con level of recognition she encountered with Doctor Who, and she doesn’t seem itching to chase it. If there were some kind of superhero call she’d be open to the possibility but acknowledges that it’s often hard to find a sufficiently “complex, nuanced character” in the heightened world of comic-book films – which is why she loves The Sandman, the second series of which she is filming now. Last year she also clearly loved performing Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons, the Sam Steiner two-hander in which she and Aidan Turner live in a world whose citizens are forced to speak no more than 140 words every day.

So in Jenna Coleman’s future there may be more theatre, and perhaps there will be more comedy, if her agent can be convinced. If it’s Geordie, American, Welsh or regal you want, look no further. She can wear a crown, she can fire a gun. She can do it all. She’s made it, and it was always inevitable.

‘Jackdaw’ is in UK cinemas from January 26

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Some people were always supposed to be stars. With a series of increasingly interesting roles and the self-assurance to speak his mind, John Boyega seems to be one of them. The 31-year-old has now been acting on-screen for almost half of his life. In 2015, he went from actor to sensation after first appearing as Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens; and now, the world at his feet, he has the enviable freedom to do almost exactly as he pleases. Where does he go from here?

Boyega’s latest role, and the reason NME is talking to him via Zoom from London as he sits in a fuggy, grey Los Angeles, is that of Brian Brown-Easley. Brown-Easley was a 33-year-old American Marine veteran who, desperate to be paid the disability money he was owed by the Department Of Veterans Affairs, held up a bank in Atlanta on July 7, 2017 by sliding an employee a piece of paper that read “I have a bomb.” Brown-Easley never produced anything resembling a weapon, and didn’t want the millions of dollars Wells Fargo might have had on the premises. He only wanted what was owed to him. It was $892.

Though Brown-Easley was “unfailingly polite” and cooperative throughout the ordeal, he was shot – to the surprise of those trying to manage the situation – by ex-Marine sniper Dennis Ponte after three hours inside the building. Set almost entirely in and around the bank, Breaking is a character study of Brown-Easley, attempting to communicate to the audience the issues he was grappling with at the time: separation from his wife and daughter, mental health issues, poverty. But the story is also inseparable from the spate of violence against Black people which triggered the Black Lives Matter movement, protests in which Boyega himself played a crucial role. More on that later.

When he had finished the first draft of Breaking with director Abi Damaris Corbin, co-writer Kwame Kwei-Armah knew that Boyega would be the perfect Brown-Easley. “It was the age profile and it was the level of intensity that I knew that John would bring to the role,” he says over the phone. “I could hear his voice when we were writing. And I could see him.” There was never any doubt, he says, that Boyega would be up to the challenge.

“I’ve always had roles that shine a light”

Corbin first met Boyega over Zoom. “He was in all his fly-ness, as he often is, just chattin’ – chatting about story, chatting about art, chatting about how are we gonna do this?” Together they looked at a photo of a wounded old lion, intended to resemble Brown-Easley. “This is a man who could unleash but he holds it in,” she says, “and he has the gentleness of someone who has age and wisdom and yet still is walking into this lions’ den.”

The script found its way to the top of Boyega’s pile thanks to Kwei-Armah having stayed in touch with Boyega’s manager for years. Kwei-Armah wrote the first play in which Boyega appeared, when he was a 16-year-old at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, London. “His natural talent was totally clear,” he says. “As a personality he was very, very focused on where he was going. He was funny as fuck, don’t get me wrong – it wasn’t a seriousness. He was funny but he was totally eyes-on-the-prize about where he was heading.” The pair drifted out of touch. The next time Kwei-Armah saw Boyega, the actor was a superstar.

Kwei-Armah was adamant that Boyega read Breaking. “I read it; I was blown away by it,” says Boyega, who is wearing a denim jacket with the faces of classical statues over a grey jumper, his hair in braids. “I read it as if I was watching the movie.”

Corbin’s father was a military veteran who had similar experiences to Brown-Easley. The overlooking of that population of the US is a huge issue, and one sufficiently complex that Corbin can’t conveniently point to a piece of legislation that easily explains it. But Boyega, who divides his time between the US and the UK, was shocked to hear about this neglect. His superficial understanding had led him to believe that veterans were treated well.

“My ignorance was corrected”

“Then I was taught different,” he says. “My ignorance was corrected in that sense.” Brown-Easley became a fascinating man for Boyega to embody. “I liked the complication and the duality of his character,” he says. “So much going on: the PTSD he’s going through; not having access to his daughter…” At the same time, Boyega knew that Brown-Easley was a movie nerd who was into comic books, and that he had the ability to tell jokes, to be soft, and to be gentle. The film portrays a man whose temperament is totally at odds with the crime he is attempting to pull off.

Boyega has played a real man before, and played him well. In Steve McQueen’s BAFTA-winning anthology series Small Axe, he was Red, White And Blue‘s Leroy Logan, the first chair of the National Black Police Association (NBPA), a policeman who made hugely important contributions to the inquiry into the killing of Damilola Taylor among many other things. “John just got it,” Logan told The Guardian in 2020. “He saw me as what I was, a Black man and a Black cop trying to make change from within.”

When playing figures from real life, says Boyega, you become more academic about the task at hand. You must avoid prioritising yourself; you become the other person. The team contacted Brown-Easley’s ex-wife, Jessica, and daughter, Jayla, to clarify that they wanted to hear from them before telling Brown-Easley’s story with as much truth as possible. The first day Boyega was on camera was the anniversary of Brown-Easley’s death. “We had a moment of silence and the world faded away,” Corbin told the Los Angeles Times. “We saw Brian on camera.” Jessica saw a screening of Breaking and, in Boyega’s words, “She said that she loved the movie. She loved the portrayal and she thought it was an important story to tell. And she loved what I had done with Brian.”

Because the action was so rooted in one place, the scrutiny on Boyega and his facial expressions was immense. The role required “an actor that can carry interiority”, says Kwei-Armah. Whoever played Brown-Easley would need to capture his “angered dignity”. Corbin agrees: “He can capture with his eyes what I couldn’t do with two pages of exposition of showing you a scene. You see the past unveiled in his eyes.” Though Kwei-Armah knew that Boyega would be good, he was still surprised when he saw the footage from the set. “I was like, ‘Oh, you’ve gone deeper than I thought you would,’” he says.

“I was blown away by ‘Breaking'”

The resonance of the role for Boyega is particularly acute because Brown-Easley’s skin colour is no accident. He is a man killed by the authorities in a situation that Boyega acknowledges a white man would probably have escaped alive. Ponte, the sniper who killed Brown-Easley, “was basically influenced by the same kind of stereotypical fear that causes these hasty violent situations”, says Boyega. He means situations like the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner. The actor was one of thousands who marched in London on June 3, 2020 to say that enough was enough. And, though he had not planned to, Boyega ended up addressing the crowd.

His speech from that day is astonishing for its raw passion. In a voice that becomes increasingly hoarse over the five minutes, Boyega screams that “Black lives have always mattered”. He battles tears to say: “We are a physical representation of our support for George Floyd. We are a physical representation of our support for Sandra Bland. We are a physical representation of our support for Trayvon Martin. We are a physical representation of our support for Stephen Lawrence. For Mark Duggan.”

When Kwei-Armah saw the speech, he cried. “I cried with joy and with pride. And I went, ‘I knew him as a boy and now here is a man.’” The writer is 25 years older than Boyega and remembers when this kind of speech might have caused the industry to turn its back on an actor. It was extraordinarily brave to risk those kind of consequences, he says. “He was putting his whole career at risk. I was magnificently proud.” Later, it would also make Kwei-Armah feel even more certain that Boyega would understand what Breaking was trying to achieve. “Let’s give voice to who we’re trying to give voice to.” Rather than damage his career, Boyega had sent himself straight to the top of a lot of important lists in the industry.

Boyega, a little defensive, says that he was never asked questions about the issues around Black Lives Matter until he made his speech. He must think that people mistakenly believe that he jumped on a bandwagon. But the themes have always been present in the choices he made: in his films Detroit, My Murder, Half Of The Yellow Sun. Even Attack The Block, a film about aliens invading a council estate. (Boyega’s character says, “I think the government’s sending dem tings to come and kill Black boys.”) “I think from the very start of this, I’ve had roles that shine a light on that nuance,” he says.

“Sixteen in acting is like 30 in real life”

Boyega was only 19 when he starred in Attack The Block. He had “already sipped the juice of ‘I wanna be a movie star’,” he says. And he already felt old, even by that point. “Sixteen in acting is like 30 in real life,” he says. “It is actually a long game plan. You know? You might not get opportunities. It’s a long game plan.”

Boyega’s game plan is still unfolding, and there’s a lot of it left. Among the accents he would still like to pull off on film – “maybe some form of alien voice; get into different octaves” – is that of Calabar, Nigeria, the country where his parents are from. And on the horizon are films Attack the Block 2, They Cloned Tyrone, The Test and The Freshening. Though the first two are fun action films, the latter two seem to play with the themes to which Boyega is particularly drawn: The Test is about an immigrant and a far-right fanatic, and The Freshening is about an injection that the government hopes will quell civil unrest by enabling everyone to see each other as the same race.

Though his colossal fame means that millions will watch these performances of his, Boyega himself doesn’t watch himself back, says Corbin. He has a good sense himself of whether he performed well or not. “He knows when it’s great,” says Corbin. “He’s like, ‘Fuck yeah – I did it.’”

‘Breaking’ is out now on digital download

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Fuck off! Yes, Succession is back. True to form, the end of the last season of Jesse Armstrong’s colossal troma (tragedy-comedy-drama) had its audience simultaneously gasping for breath and licking their lips. In case you’ve been in a coma (a real coma, not a comedy drama), here’s a quick catch-up: the Roy children’s attempted coup against their father failed when Tom (Matthew MacFadyen) told Logan (Brian Cox) exactly what the kids were planning, enabling Logan to take full control of the business at the last minute and having GoJo buy Waystar out. Naughty Tom. Lucky Logan.

As we begin our fourth descent into the richest corner of Hell, we are at Logan’s birthday party, which might as well be his deathbed for all the fun people are having. If you’re in the same room as Logan Roy, you take your mood cue from him – and the old boy, separated from the three offspring he hates the least, is bored and itchy: he doesn’t look like he wants to play musical chairs any time soon. To make matters worse, Greg (Nicholas Braun) has brought a random date, Bridget, treating the exclusive private event like a group trip to Wahaca. “You’re a laughing stock in polite society,” Tom witheringly notes.

Over at Roman’s (Kieran Culkin) pad, things feel nice and familiar as Roman and Kendall (Jeremy Strong) arrogantly dismiss proposed logos for their new media venture, The Hundred. After shifty Shiv (Sarah Snook) breezes in, she gets a call from Tom. To Shiv’s chagrin, he’s been hanging out with Naomi Pierce (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) and he may be inadvertently reporting that the great white shark is considering buying Pierce, the vast media conglomerate. This ends up being a costly leak for Logan: all of a sudden, the three youngest Roys propose binning The Hundred; they’re mainly interested in bringing up Logan’s blood pressure to fatal levels, and succeeding where they failed last time.

Back at the party/funeral, presidential hopeful Connor (Alan Ruck) is providing some comic relief by wondering aloud whether he should spend $100 million to stay in the political conversation. “If I fall below 1% I fear I would become a laughing stock,” he says. Tom and Greg – “the Disgusting Brothers”, in Greg’s eyes – then have one of the best conversations of the episode when Greg tells Tom he got saucy with Bridget in one of Logan’s rooms. Tom lies to Greg that Logan has cameras in all of his rooms (“You’ve accidentally made him a sex tape, Greg”) and says that Greg has to come clean. After he obediently does – a scene that is inexplicably and tragically left out of the episode – he proudly reports that Logan called him “disgusting”.

It’s then on to a full-on bidding war: the kids visit Nan Pierce (Cherry Jones) and propose various billions to her, all while the Logan contingent have her on the phone and propose various billions to her. She pretends to be revolted by the whole thing but ends up $10 billion richer as, after multiple back-and-forths, she accepts the offer from the kids (“Congratulations on saying the biggest number, you fucking morons,” Logan snarls). We know, even if Tom deflects, that Logan has only lost because Tom felt loyal to Shiv.

This loyalty, however, looks likely to have reached its expiration date. In a touching scene, Shiv comes home to the couple’s barren apartment and tells Tom that it might be time for them to divorce. Paralysed by the implications, they lie at right angles on the bed next to each other and hold hands. “We gave it a go,” they say. Will anyone else love either of them?

‘Succession’ is streaming now on Sky Atlantic

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If you thought Daniel Craig’s accent in the Knives Out films was a bit iffy, strap in for Django, the new Sky Atlantic series set in Texas in the late 19th century. Wow there are some fascinating accents flying about the place here. And that’s coming from a writer who publicly defended Craig’s accent. He’s a great actor; he was probably in control of the whole thing. But in Django, you spend a good deal of the show wondering what accents the actors are even attempting, and whether perhaps each of them was told the story was taking place in a different country. It makes for a baffling and distracting experience.

The story – although more on that later – is that a mysterious figure, who looks like a cross between Aragorn and Gandalf, turns up in New Babylon, an area of the South in which people live harmoniously irrespective of skin colour. We discover that he, Django (Matthias Schoenaerts), is the father of Sarah (Lisa Vicari), who founded New Babylon with a former slave called John (Nicholas Pinnock). Sarah thought that her father was dead and wants him to go. But he might come in handy for John, whom Sarah is set to marry, as the town is beset by attacks from a ruthless weirdo called Elizabeth Thurman (Noomi Rapace), who has the strangest accent of them all and an ill-defined motive.

Django doesn’t try hard to distract you from the many, many other things in your life competing for your attention. It just bumbles along, happy to be a mediocre Western, never delivering any particularly interesting dialogue or anything that would have you scrambling to play the next episode. As well as the accents, the script is a problem – “You know, it’s a funny thang: you can’t dig a grave without ending up inside one” – and there are one too many moments in which a character’s ‘death’ involves the actor sliding carefully onto the ground so as not to hurt themselves too badly. A huge feeling of ‘meh’ hangs over the production.

But perhaps God-awful accents and unconvincing deaths would be forgivable if the story held your attention. Fundamentally, this is what we should care about. But no, something’s off here as well. The characters feel both underwritten and borrowed from other places; the motivations of at least one main character are unclear and therefore difficult to invest in and there are a great many shoot-outs in which it’s not entirely clear what’s going on or exactly why we should care.

What Django manages to do, unfortunately, is impress on the audience just how successful productions like Deadwood and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs are. It’s hard to get dialogue right. It’s hard to get tone right. It’s a tricky genre, and a lot of people may go into it believing that it can’t be all that difficult. With the trillions of other things out there, vying furiously for your eyeballs, focusing on Django would be a poor decision.

‘Django’ is coming to Sky Atlantic and NOW on March 1

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Ah, the golden age of television. It has its sweet, sweet benefits but boy does it have its drawbacks. Sure, we’re now treated to new, era-defining productions every few days, but one of the less publicised downsides of the streaming explosion is that, in order to meet our insatiable expectation for new content, it’s easier than ever to get away with broadcasting absolute guff. Shrinking, Apple TV+’s new show, is absolute guff, unfortunately.

Where to start? First up, the premise – a therapist (Jason Segel) picks up the pieces after the death of his wife and learns some important Lessons along the way – is as clichéd as they come. ‘Dead wife’ is a lazy plot device that writers hope will immediately make their characters more complex. That’s not to say that characters can’t grieve: in the case of a therapist widower like Sean (Robin Williams) in Good Will Hunting, sorrow does add nuance to the character, the woman who has passed away coming alive through well-observed, painfully realistic dialogue. In Shrinking, the writers appear never to have heard human beings talk to each other before.

When we meet Segel’s character, Jimmy, he has an awful relationship with his 17-year-old daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) and is processing his wife’s death via pills and young women in their underwear. Because Shrinking is played as a warm-hearted comedy, these troubling coping mechanisms don’t read as believable, and neither does Jimmy. While an intriguing, dark version of this show could exist, in which Jimmy really does lose the plot in a manic and more realistic way, what we’re supposed to believe in this version is that every few sentences big goofy Jimmy would crack a joke dripping in sitcom self-awareness while the characters around him simply roll their eyes.

The selling point of the show (forgotten after about episode two) is that Jimmy’s breakdown prompts him to make radical interventions in his clients’ lives. “Just fucking leave him,” he tells Grace, a woman whose husband is emotionally abusing her. “It’s not that easy,” she says. “It is that easy,” he insists. And, lo and behold, it really is: Grace leaves her husband – who is also capable of extreme violence, by the way – and her life miraculously gets better! Jimmy makes a young ex-soldier with aggression issues (Luke Tennie) take up boxing, then invites him to live in his pool house. The culture of therapy is different in the US than in the UK but we shudder to think what any therapist watching Shrinking would think of the professionals in the show. Jimmy, along with colleagues Gabby (Jessica Williams) and Paul (Harrison Ford), are about as likely to be working therapists as a horse. Jimmy ought to have been fired long before the show begins.

One of the most extraordinary things in the series is that Liz (Christa Miller), a character whom the writers see as ‘woman who pokes her nose in and polishes rocks’, is treated like a criminal by Jimmy and Gaby because she has the audacity to care deeply for Alice, a girl who has not only lost her mother but has been severely neglected by her selfish father, who doesn’t know a single thing about what’s going on in her life. A recurring theme, for some reason, is that characters aggressively tell Liz to back off for essentially being a better human than any of them.

Everywhere, this problem rears its head: in order for a story point to be made, characters need to behave irrationally and out of character. Everyone immediately reconciles after an argument, of course, and things returns to normal. For a show that professes to want to explore grief and trauma, Shrinking is occasionally so saccharine it will give you a headache.

The parts with Harrison Ford’s character, grumpy old Paul, are some of the strongest in the show. Paul has the beginnings of Parkinson’s disease and, like Jimmy, struggles with his relationship with daughter. Ford can be funny, and the illness story is comparatively affecting, but the problem here is that it feels a little like two different shows stitched together. As a character, Paul doesn’t seem to belong in the world of Jimmy and Gaby, in part because his storyline – perhaps because of Ford’s strength as an actor – is handled relatively skilfully, without any of the grating injections of implausible gags.

In episode eight, the penultimate of the series, suddenly the jokes start landing and the drama starts working. It’s a welcome relief. But “stick with it for seven episodes then you get a few laughs” isn’t much of a recommendation, is it?

‘Shrinking’ is available on Apple TV+ from January 27

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