Benedict Cumberbatch spends the first hour high in New York with his father’s ashes in a box, and it is the funniest thing we have seen him do. What follows is careful, well made and a little tidier than the books.
Edward St. Aubyn wrote five short novels about Patrick Melrose, and David Nicholls, who created and wrote the series, has given each one an hour. It is a good plan: the books are about a man who cannot leave the past alone, and the episodes keep going back to it. The story runs from New York in 1982 to Provence in the 1960s and on to Patrick’s own attempts at fatherhood. We recommend it. The first two hours are as good as British television drama gets, and the last three are good television, which is not quite the same thing.
Cumberbatch’s Patrick arrives in New York already high, collects his father’s ashes from a funeral parlour in a cardboard box, and carries the box about the city all day while trying to decide whether to grieve or to score. He does both. He talks to himself in half a dozen voices, chairs a meeting of his own personalities in a bathroom, and pursues Marianne Banks (Allison Williams) with the confidence of a man who has never been told no by a waiter. We laughed a great deal. Then Edward Berger cut to a small boy (Sebastian Maltz) walking down a staircase in a hot French house, and the laugh stopped in our throats. That cut, made over and over, is how the series works. Every joke has a child underneath it.
James Friend shoots the New York hour with the camera loose and the colours turned up, hotel corridors in a sick yellow and the streets smeared with neon, so the screen looks the way Patrick feels. France is still and golden, and that is the point: it is the most beautiful place in the series and the worst things happen there. Tom Burton’s production design gives Patrick a suite he cannot pay for and fills it, over one evening, with the litter of a binge. Keith Madden puts Cumberbatch in a good suit that gets steadily less good. The editors, Dan Roberts, Luke Dunkley and Tim Murrell, make the jumps between decades read as memory rather than explanation, and Hauschka’s score, mostly a piano with things laid on its strings, keeps ticking under the comedy.
The second hour belongs to the parents. Hugo Weaving plays David Melrose softly, correcting everyone’s grammar, and it is as frightening as anything we have seen him do because his voice is never raised. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Eleanor, the American money that pays for all of it, drinks in the bedroom and finds reasons to be elsewhere. What David does to his son the series does not show and we will not describe. Berger shows us the door and lets us do the rest. It moved us more than we were prepared for, by being restrained where the New York hour was not.
The problem is what comes after. Once Patrick is clean, or trying to be, the series has less to do, and the last three hours are about dinner parties, a marriage under strain and forgiving people who do not deserve it. Most critics have liked these hours less and so did we. Nicholls keeps the dialogue quick, but Cumberbatch’s tics, the darting eyes and the muttered asides, were built for a man on heroin and look like mannerism on a man on mineral water. Each hour also arrives at its lesson too neatly, with a speech near the end to make sure we have understood, which the novels were too cruel to allow.
There is plenty of British drama about miserable people in large houses, and this is one of the sharper ones because it never asks us to admire the houses. The addiction is treated as a symptom rather than as the plot. Most dramas about drugs give you one big relapse. This one gives you the small ones, the reasonable-sounding ones, and they are harder to watch.
It is an 18 and it earns the certificate twice over, in the first two hours. Watch those two in one sitting and the rest across a week. Patrick would not approve of the moderation, but he would recognise it.
