I need to be very clear on something.
I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of Starz's presentation of the British drama The
Couple Next Door. No not ironically like all the hate-watchers who claim that’s
the only reason they've watched Emily in Paris or …And Just Like
That. And not because the show had some kind of deep meaning behind it. No The
Couple Next Door was a show that had, to use a phrase that I've coined, no
nutritional value.
That's one of the reasons, I should
add, why I enjoyed it so much. As I've written more than once one of the sad
parts of the era of Peak TV is that it seems to have killed the idea of the guilty
pleasure. Many showrunners such as
Shonda Rhimes argue that shows like Scandal and Bridgerton are
actually series about deep ideas about society when all they are is soap operas.
If you watch a show that is pure junk you can't even be honest about why you
like it: which is to just turn your brain off. For all the flirtations Couple
Next Door had with bits of a deeper meaning, it never walked away from the
idea that its basic plot was of a 1990s direct to video film spread out over
the kind of series format Cinemax and
Showtime aired late at night during that same period. (Not that anyone ever
watched these kinds of things, of course, certainly not yours truly.) I
actually admired it more for its lack of pretention: in an era where all shows
must seem to be have greatness if you look deep enough, there's something to be
said for just keeping it as a pure entertainment.
That said I was somewhat surprised to
know even as I reviewed it that the show had been renewed for a second season.
How were they going to do that? Well, the answer was that Starz and the
creators have more or less decided to turn Couple Next Door into the
weirdest kind of anthology ever, not that far removed from the kind of sequels
to so many of these movies starring the Queens of the B's such as Shannon Tweed
and Tanya Roberts over the nineties. (I mean obviously I saw them in my local
blockbusters. I certainly never rented them.)
Season 2 takes place not long after
the events of Season 1. In a completely logical sense given how Season 1 ended,
both families that were at the center of everything that happened in Season 1
have moved out. A new couple has moved in to one of those houses. Charlotte and
Jacob have been married for quite a few years and spoiler alert they are not
swingers. If anything Sam Palladio and Annabella Scholey actually seem like a
perfect happy and unpretentious couple. Charlotte's a cardiac surgeon; Jacob
has a less demanding job. They both work at the same hospital, they've got a
solid marriage and they actually tease each other in a playful way. When
Charlotte wants to lure Jacob in he says with genuine mockery: "It's not
even Sex Wednesday." They seem to have the perfect balance of work and
home life, which means there have to be flaws in the façade.
Oddly enough if there are cracks it
seems to be from the perceptions of those around them. The couple moved to the
neighborhood to take care of Charlotte's father, who lived in the neighborhood
and is clearly in the late stages of dementia. In the first episode Charlotte
admits they have to move him to assisted living. The bigger problem is that
Charlotte's father clearly never liked Jacob and prefer her old beau Leo, who
comes from a family of wealth and has just moved back home from years abroad
doing good. Jacob is clearly jealous of him, though at this point Leo has moved
on. Everyone else, however, doesn't seem to have.
In another sign of their lack of
pretention, Season 2 doesn't even bother with building up the idea of a snake
in the grass. No it makes clear right away when Mia (Aggy Adams) shows up at
the hospital and applies for a nursing job. She says she's from Norway and that
she has a different way of doing things.
As someone who has spent the last
decade watching so many limited series and procedurals where all of people at
work are clueless of the villain's bad behavior no matter how obvious it is in
private or even public, I can't tell you how refreshing it is that The
Couple Next Door doesn't bother with this subtlety. Everybody in the hospital
from the moment they meet her clocks that there's something off with Mia. It's
not just Charlotte and Jacob; it's the head nurse, most of the doctors, even
some of the patients. And Mia doesn't even go out of her way to be subtle. She
undresses in front of strangers, is far too friendly to Jacob and Charlotte,
doesn't even bother to hide the fact that she doesn't like that a patient who
sexually harassed her is dead. Again everyone around her picks up on it. No one
thinks she's dangerous: they just thinks she's strange.
Charlotte and Jacob know just how
weird she is when she ends up renting the house next to them after its
mentioned in passing. They are both unsettled by her behavior from the start
and you get the feeling its just the fact that they're English makes them too
polite to tell her to sod off. This is
before she begins to get deeper into their lives, attempts to seduce both
Charlotte and Jacob, often at the same time and keeps showing up in places she
shouldn't. Usually we have to wait until the third episode in most series for the
victims to realize the snake's in the grass. Everyone knows by the time the first
episode's even half over.
The clear link between the two seasons
is Hugh Dennis who last year was the unabashed pervert from day one. It's a credit to the series that Couple makes
it clear that he's suffering the consequences. His wife has left him; he's
doing community service and everyone else in the neighborhood is shunning him. Mia
makes an effort to reach out to him and to his credit, he is very clear about
who he is by the end of the second episode. Mia goes out of her way to react
like everyone else. I found Dennis's character
contemptible; now I actually feel sorry for him. This is a man whose voyeurism
has cost him everything and has nothing left. In the second episode we see him in
his basement trying to unpack the telescope he used to peer as the sexual
behavior of the couple next door. He threw it to the ground this time but I'm
not sure he'll be able to resist the urge much longer.
I actually think the second season of Couple
Next Door is better than the first because the story is a lot simpler and
the writers go out of their way to make it clear almost immediately that Mia
has a hidden agenda. It doesn't hide the fact that she's clearly mentally
unstable or that she's hiding her identity from the people here or that she
clearly has a deeper reason for deciding to wreck the lives of Charlotte and Jacob.
It has something to do with her history from Poland and perhaps some kind of
public trial, but beyond that the writers have not revealed much more. This mystery
I do appreciate because there clearly has to be a motivation for her to do what
she's doing: it's clearly not because she loves chaos. And I have to say its
refreshing after so many years of morally ambiguous characters in so many
series to see one with a proper femme fatale villain, something Adams leans into
whenever she gets the chance.
Again The Couple Next Door is
not art and it makes no pretense of being that. But this is the first series I
wouldn't mind if there was an anthology format going forward with each season a
new set of tenants moving into both houses until the tenant's association
starts to worry about the property values and does screenings to keep them out.
Or perhaps they won't have to. That is, after all, how the majority of
direct-to-video franchises worked over the decades: a formulaic scenario with
just enough of a plot to tie together all the sex and violence that was
happening onscreen. (Not that any of my readers would have watched such things,
of course. I certainly never did.)
My score: 3.5 stars.
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