Jack Thorne’s four-part drama about parents fighting a hospital over their daughter’s care is as fair as it is painful, and Michael Sheen and Sharon Horgan are both quietly superb. It repeats itself in the middle, and Marnie is argued about more than she is seen.
Jack Thorne’s Best Interests is four hour-long episodes about one decision, and it does not pretend the decision is easy for anybody. Marnie (Niamh Moriarty) is a teenager with a form of muscular dystrophy. Her doctors, led by Samantha (Noma Dumezweni), have concluded that keeping her alive is no longer the kind thing, and they say so to her parents in a small room with a box of tissues on the table. Her mother Nicci (Sharon Horgan) will not hear it. Her father Andrew (Michael Sheen) hears it. That is the drama: not a family against a hospital, but a marriage pulled in two directions, with a judge to settle it.
It is good, and we recommend it to anyone who can bear the subject, which is a real condition on the recommendation. Thorne has decided that nobody here will be the villain, and he holds to that for four hours. The doctors are tired and decent. The lawyers are competent. Pippa Haywood’s Judge Spottiswood runs her court without a raised voice. Michael Keillor directs it all at a steady pace, and the series is at its best when it simply lets two people who love the same child fail to agree about her.
Sheen plays Andrew small. He fidgets with his cuffs, agrees with whoever spoke last, and keeps trying to make a joke land in rooms where jokes do not land. Horgan goes the other way: Nicci has become the fight, and the series is honest that this has cost her the ability to hear anything else. Both of them are doing the kind of work that does not look like work. The surprise is Alison Oliver as Katie, the sibling who has spent years being the child who did not need anything, and who has one scene in a car park that we have thought about since.
David Raedeker shoots the hospital in flat, even light and the flashbacks in something warmer and lower, so that Marnie’s past looks like a place and her present looks like a corridor. Dominic Strevens cuts between the two so that each clinical phrase at the hearing is answered by a picture of the girl it describes. Alison Butler’s design of the family house is right in the small things: the hoist over the bed, the ramp, the clutter that a long illness builds up in a hallway. Sheena Napier puts Nicci in the same few jumpers across what are plainly weeks, and we noticed before we understood why.
The flashbacks are where the series got us. Marnie, well enough to talk, is sharp and bossy and funny about her own body, and Moriarty plays her as a person rather than a case. We cried in the first episode, properly, at a scene of her teasing her father about his taste in music, and then we noticed the cut back to the ward had been timed to make us, and we resented it slightly. The series does this more than once. It is affecting, and it knows exactly how.
The middle two episodes are the problem. The same argument is staged in a kitchen, then a car, then a hospital corridor, then a solicitor’s office, and the words change less than the rooms do. Thorne’s fairness becomes a method: everyone is given a speech, and by the third episode we could hear the speeches coming. Marnie herself, once the hearing starts, is talked about far more than she is on screen, and a series this careful about who gets a voice ought to have noticed that it had taken hers away.
Against other British dramas about the health service and the courts, this one is unusually patient and unusually unwilling to pick a side, and we think that is the right way to make it. It is also why it sags. Thorne has written a case rather than a plot, and a case has a shape that resists being interesting for four hours.
It is a 15, and it earns the certificate with nothing but talk. Watch it in two sittings rather than four; the argument carries better when you have not had a week to forget which side you were on. And do not start it late on a night when there are children asleep upstairs, because you will go and look at them, and then you will not sleep.
