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Apple TV's Down Cemetery Road continues the Mick Herron vibe of anti-establishment thrillers, with Emma Thompson starring as a PI Zoë Boehm.
Posted in: Apple, Review, TV | Tagged: Down Cemetery Road, Mick Herron
Down Cemetery Road: Apple TV Keeps The Mick Herron Party Going
Apple TV's Down Cemetery Road continues the Mick Herron vibe of anti-establishment thrillers, with Emma Thompson starring as a PI Zoë Boehm.
Article Summary
- Apple TV adapts Mick Herron's Down Cemetery Road, starring Emma Thompson as tough PI Zoë Boehm.
- The series delivers Herron's trademark sardonic, anti-establishment tone with an all-civilian cast.
- Ruth Wilson plays a regular woman who stumbles into a deadly government conspiracy in Oxford.
- Morwenna Banks pens a sharp script, making this subversive British thriller fresh and entertaining.
Immediately after the finale of Slow Horses season five ended on Apple TV, the first two episodes of Down Cemetery Road autoplayed. This is the Apple TV adaptation of Mick Herron's earlier novel about a flawed, hard-nosed Oxford private eye named Zoë Boehm, played by Emma Thompson, like a grouchy aging punk with a really cool hairdo and dark leather jacket. This was, in fact, Herron's first novel, written years before he began the Slough House books, and he wrote four books in the series before devoting his time to Jackson Lamb's world of horrible spies.
The tone of Down Cemetery Road remains sardonic, sarcastic, and darkly comic, as we now expect from Mick Herron, but this time the characters are ordinary civilians. Ruth Wilson plays an ordinary decent person who doesn't have a past of secrets or trauma. She's a Hitchcockian heroine —a normal person who just wants to look out for a missing kid, only to unleash a murderous government conspiracy that puts everyone in danger. Every character in any position of power is an asshole here, so that political point of view is front and centre. This might be the first time Ruth Wilson has played an ordinary person, albeit one who feels alienated and dissatisfied with her life, and everyone tries to gaslight her into thinking she's crazy.
Then it struck me that the plot of Down Cemetery Road is a variation of the 1978 comedy thriller Foul Play, where Ruth Wilson is the Goldie Hawn character and Emma Thompson is the Chevy Chase private eye figure who believes her. The script by comedienne Morwenna Banks has a precision in its sarcastic banter that's different in style from Slow Horses yet still feels like Mick Herron. Ruth Wilson's character has a career rather than the bored housewife of the book, and there's a streamlined, lazy-focused drive to the plot. The show feels like an ITV suspense drama if ITV suspense dramas were actually good. It's more subversive in its assumption that the status quo is not okay, that institutions have always been terrible and full of awful people, rather than just a few bad apples who can be sorted out by the "good guys", which is the conservative slant of ITV and BBC crime dramas. I guess Apple TV is where the more subversive and anti-Establishment – and more fun! – British dramas are now ending up now.
Down Cemetery Road is streaming on Apple TV.
Down Cemetery Road
8/10
Apple TV adapts Mick Herron's earlier novel, this time featuring Emma Thompson as a hardnosed private eye in a Hitchcockian thriller that's as darkly comic and sarcastic as Slow Horses with Ruth Wilson as an innocent who stumbles upon a conspiracy that puts her and everyone in danger, continuing Herron's snarky anti-establishment vibe.
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