DEBORAH ROSS: Grim Simm or preachy Simm? Oh, the trauma!

Trauma

Monday-Wednesday, ITV 

Rating:

Collateral

Monday, BBC2 

Rating:

McMafia

Sunday, BBC1

Rating:

Doctor Foster writer Mike Bartlett’s new series, Trauma, debuted on Monday evening, as did David Hare’s Collateral. (As both starred John Simm, might we call this a ‘Simmultaneous broadcast?’) But whereas one was yet another melodramatic revenge thriller beset by wild implausibilities – I’ll just wander into this hospital operating theatre, shall I? – the other is a state-of-the-nation drama taking in the police, the Church, the army, immigrants, removal centres, terrorism and drugs. 

It may be unfair at this stage to compare, given we’ve seen all of Trauma and only the first of four episodes of Collateral, but what we can say is that the former was cleverer, and more thought-provoking than you might have initially imagined. 

With Trauma the basic deal was: Dan Bowker (John Simm) lost his teenage son, Alex, on the operating table after he’d been stabbed

With Trauma the basic deal was: Dan Bowker (John Simm) lost his teenage son, Alex, on the operating table after he’d been stabbed

With Trauma the basic deal was: Dan Bowker (Simm) lost his teenage son, Alex, on the operating table after he’d been stabbed, and thereafter is fixated on the trauma surgeon, Jon Allerton (played by a wonderfully aloof Adrian Lester) who, Dan insisted, could have saved Alex’s life but must have made a mistake. What? We’d already seen that Jon was an awesome guy in a scene saving his 17-year-old daughter from a rock fall while happily accepting her newly revealed lesbianism (awesome-guy behaviour, that). 

He also wears beautiful suits – sit on that, Alex Godman! – and lives in a beautiful house with his beautiful psychiatrist wife and that beautiful daughter. It’s a world ripe for destroying, in other words, but why does Dan want to destroy it? The big hole in the narrative was always: why is Dan blaming the surgeon and not the killer (another teenage boy)? 

That never made sense, frankly. It only made sense in the context of what Bartlett set out to do, which was to make it about class (and race, perhaps). We saw that Dan was working class, had just been made redundant, and was in such a bad place financially he had to race to the hospital by… bus! 

At one point, Dan asked if his son would still be alive if the family had been wealthy and he’d attended a private school. ‘He died because of me,’ he said. ‘Because I’m a failure. I wasn’t born to the right people and neither was my son.’ He looked at Jon’s high-achieving, privileged life and could not tolerate it, but here is what is interesting: Dan is a devastated, heartbroken, grieving parent, yet he was never, ever sympathetic. So throughout all three episodes I was thinking: hey, leave Jon alone! But I didn’t know if Jon had messed up or hadn’t. Didn’t know if Jon was lying or wasn’t. Was this class prejudice as well? 

Even when it was revealed – spoiler alert! – that Jon had cocked up, I just kind of thought: oh well, that happens. I’m sure he tried his best. It was thought-provoking and also rather gripping as Dan trapped Jon into revealing he’d had a drink the day of Alex’s death and trapped him into attending Alex’s funeral, and you just never knew where he was going to turn up next: serving in the hospital cafe; consulting Jon’s wife as a patient; at the front door of their house, pretending to be from Oxfam, when the daughter was home alone – quite, quite, terrifying. 

It all led to a big bust-up in a garden, and then an ending I’m not sure I quite understood. Dan may have elicited the truth from Jon, but he lied, cheated, stalked everybody and held a knife to the throat of a teenage girl, so now his estranged wife loves him again? Can someone explain this please? 

Meanwhile, as Simmultaneously broadcast on the BBC, Collateral began with the shooting of a Muslim pizza-delivery boy and explored how it might be connected to so much else happening in London. It offers a stunning cast. There’s a spiky detective (Carey Mulligan), a Labour MP (Simm), a vicar (Nicola Walker) and the best character thus far, Billie Piper as an angry Sloane mother who hurls her pizza to the floor when she discovers it hasn’t come with ‘extra mozzarella’. (Is ‘extra mozzarella’ code for drugs?) Yet it is supremely didactic, telling us what to think, when to think, and how to think it, particularly on the subjects of paperless immigrants, removal centres and so on. Plus, the pace is dreary. 

But McMafia grew, as this might, and while the detective doesn’t have a haunted past, she was once a champion pole-vaulter. And we do need to see how that plays out. 

Many gave up on McMafia, claiming it was a McWaste of McTime, but the finale was terrific: a chase through Moscow’s underground system, Antonio finally having the smile wiped off his face, Alex shooting Vadim and opting to be a baddie rather than a goodie, as in The Godfather. So, no McRaffia next time out, but maybe in series two (there has to be a series two, surely? What about Joseph and Lyudmilla? Where’s Kleiman?) he’ll dither over what to do next. McFaffia?



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