Hugo Blick writes, directs and produces his own thrillers, and they look like nobody else's television: long, level frames, people speaking in riddles, plots that take eight hours to close. We admire the nerve, and we wish someone in them would just answer a question.
Fi1m perspective
A Hugo Blick scene tends to open on somebody standing dead centre in a doorway, a long way off, and it does not cut. In The Honourable Woman (2014) Zac Nicholson and George Steel put Maggie Gyllenhaal at the far ends of corridors and Blick holds the frame well past the point most television would let go. When the person finally speaks, what they say usually sounds as if it was written to be quoted afterwards. That is the method: calm surfaces, riddles underneath, and the answer kept back for as long as the episode count allows.
He came at this from the other side of the camera. Blick trained as an actor at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and had a part in Batman (1989), then spent the late 1990s in comedy, writing and producing the mockumentary Operation Good Guys (1997) and co-creating the tragicomedy Marion & Geoff (2000) with Rob Brydon. The turn came with The Shadow Line (2011), a noirish crime drama, and since then he has written, directed and produced his own series through his company Eight Rooks: The Honourable Woman, Black Earth Rising (2018), which follows the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, and the western The English (2022).
What he does well is build. The Honourable Woman carries a family arms business, a peerage, a murder thirty years old and a kidnapping in Gaza across eight hours without dropping any of them, and Jason Krasucki's editing lets each scene finish before the next begins. He puts women at the centre and does not write them as types. And he can frighten you. We were horrified by the first five minutes of The Honourable Woman, a man killed at a restaurant table in front of his two small children, because Blick does not cut away from the children, and that one scene explains why Gyllenhaal's Nessa sleeps every night behind a steel door.
What he does less well is let anyone talk like a person. His characters issue statements. Some of it is good; some of it made us wish somebody would say what they knew. Some critics found The Shadow Line theatrical and were divided by it. There is a larger question too. Blick has made series about the Middle East and about Rwanda from an English writer's desk, and some have found that view limiting; on the evidence of The Honourable Woman, which wants to be a spy story and a statement about the region and does not always manage both, they have a point.
He has said he likes a cut that makes you ask why the camera went there, "because it feels like there’s an attitude". The attitude is never in doubt. He is developing California Avenue; expect a doorway, a corridor, someone at the far end of it, and a long wait before they tell you what they know. We will wait. We usually do.
Biography
Hugo Blick is a British writer, director, producer and actor. He created, wrote, directed and produced the 2014 BBC and SundanceTV miniseries The Honourable Woman.
Blick trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. His early screen work includes a role as a young Jack Napier in Tim Burton's Batman (1989). He is known for the series The Shadow Line (2011), Black Earth Rising (2018) and The English (2022), on all of which he has served as writer, director and producer. He runs his own production company, Eight Rooks.
