McMafia
Sunday, BBC1
Kiri
Wednesday, Channel 4
Rating: 
Oh McMafia, McMafia, McMafia… While it’s true that you have shed two million viewers since 5.6 million watched your opening episode, don’t be too disheartened. ITV’s Girlfriends opened with an audience of 5.2 million yet is now down to 3.8 million, although we mustn’t read too much into that apart, perhaps, from the fact that decent actresses should be awarded decent scripts.
Kiri, which starred our beloved Sarah Lancashire, shed nearly a million along the way. The BBC’s Hard Sun is only being watched by the cat that happened to be in the room when the TV was on and its owners had wandered away.
Sky’s Britannia is only being watched by a cat, and that cat is asleep.
So the post-Christmas, January drama surge has been something of a non-event this year. That said, Call The Midwife is still holding up well and will continue to hold up well for the next 56 years, remember? You just can’t argue with Call The Midwife, and if you do it will homily you to death. So it’s best left well alone.
It’s true, Alex is a damp biscuit, and therefore about as sexy as a damp biscuit, and James Norton’s portrayal is damp and biscuity, but there is something mesmerising in this
Back to McMafia because I am still hanging on in there in spite of myself. This is odd, admittedly, given I never have any idea who is shipping heroin to where – or what we’re now doing in Mumbai – and given it is so aggressively empty.
Has it yet to say anything interesting or original about global organised crime and its players? Has it yet to say anything interesting or original about greed and evil? Did I miss those bits? Or is the cold, detached emptiness kind of the point?
Either way, the only thing that I have properly learned thus far is that every home should have ‘a Joseph’, as that would be handy. If he didn’t have to race across town in the hope of foiling an assassination attempt, or plead on Lyudmilla’s behalf, he could maybe take the rubbish out? Babysit? Turn the TV off if it’s only the cat in there?
This week’s episode – the sixth of eight – was certainly the best so far and actually tense with, thankfully, no expositioning at length about shipping schedules and no happenings in Mumbai. (God, the relief.) Instead, it is now out-and-out war between Alex Godman (James Norton) and Vadim Kalyagin (Merab Ninidze); out-and-out war between the ‘good banker’ who has now turned bad and the bad Russian who was always bad.
So we have a bad v bad situation, which does make you wish they’d all just shoot each other so we could call it a day. But Rebecca and that French woman, who turned out to be an assassin? That was quite edge-of-the-seat.
Poor Rebecca, who also has to deal with being so hopelessly underwritten they make her lap-swim in a revealing swimsuit because a revealing swimsuit is, of course, essential to the plot. Probably best I don’t get started on McMafia’s women, but still. Why would you cast an actress of the calibre of Faye Marsay (who plays Alex’s sister) and then give her nothing to do?
And yet. And yet, and yet, and yet. I am still hanging on in there. Perhaps it’s just the aura of sophistication, with its drawn-out pace and all the high-end fashion (those handbag shops) and property porn (that mews house, the Kensington apartment).
True, Alex is a damp biscuit, and therefore about as sexy as a damp biscuit, and Norton’s portrayal is damp and biscuity, but there is something mesmerising in this.
Perhaps you watch simply in the hope he will break; in the hope he will laugh, lose his temper, have sex. Or do the Gangnam Style dance. Unlikely, but I’ve invested too much to turn back now.
Onto the fourth and final episode of Kiri, which stopped being about Sarah Lancashire’s social worker in episode two – a pity. Her Miriam had warmth. Her Miriam had humour. Her Miriam was someone you could properly care about. Yet she was sidelined, in effect, for a standard thriller with some clumsy assertions about race, and which ended up giving much more screen time to the white family than the black one.
Also, if you’d seen Jack Thorne’s previous drama, National Treasure, then you’d know we’d know who the guilty party was even though the guilty party got away with it.
It had its moments. The scene where Alice (Lia Williams) is interrupted by her son (Finn Bennett) as she’s taking a shower will haunt me to my dying day. Lancashire was terrific in the scenes she appeared in, even if her Bristol accent came and went.
But ultimately, what happened to Kiri wasn’t murder. It was an accident and, while tragic, no one would have been convicted of killing her, which made all the covering up seem preposterous.
The guilty party was only guilty of giving chase, while proving white people can be smug and despicable, which is where you always sensed this was going. Still, at least the women were complicated and didn’t wear revealing swimsuits.
So I guess we should, at least, be quite grateful for that.