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Posted in: BBC, Netflix, Review, TV | Tagged: bbc, crime drama, david tennant, doctor who, Dolly Wells, inside man, Jeckyll, Lydia Wets, netflix, noir, stanley tucci, steven moffat
Inside Man: Steven Moffat Creates New Series Subgenre, "Noir Farce"
Inside Man is Steven Moffat's first original story for television for over a decade, a noir suspense thriller about murder. Every second British drama is a crime show about murder, but what happens when an inveterate cleverclogs like Moffat decides to try his hand at it? The result is something that you think should be dark, claustrophobic, and grim, but instead, it's darkly comic and endlessly entertaining.
Inside Man stars David Tennant, Stanley Tucci, Dolly Wells, and Lydia West as, respectively, an English vicar, a condemned murderer on Death Row in Arizona, a British high school teacher, and a young journalist who all become connected by one story, one terrible mystery. Tucci plays a variation on Hannibal Lecter, a genius murderer who helps solve cases from behind bars and becomes the essential element of the unraveling tragedy. There's a missing person in danger. There are moral questions posed to everyone in the story. There is a thematic richness to the show: is everyone truly good? There is a persistent motif of the physical threat men pose to women – Tucci murdered his wife; his friend on Death Row, played by Atkins Estimond, is a cheerful and unapologetic serial killer of women, Wells rescues West from a predator man on a train; the self-justifying Tennant becomes a real threat to Wells even as he denies it and justifies his actions, lying to himself all the way.
Inside Man Could Be a New Subgenre: the British Noir Farce
Steven Moffat proves once again he is possibly the cleverest screenwriter on the planet. He is also an entertainer to the core. He can't help it. He wants us to have fun. He can write dark and grim stories, but they do not wallow in the grim darkness that the majority of British crime dramas do. He has things he wants to say, ideas he wants to explore. Inside Man is Moffat having fun with a new idea that he wants to write that's not based on an existing property. It's not a showrunner job on a long-running franchise like Doctor Who (you know we were going to bring that up!), it's not an update on classic horror or gothic novels like Dracula or Jekyll, it's not an adaptation of a beloved bestseller like The Time Traveler's Wife. With Inside Man, Moffat wants to explore what makes good people do bad things. What makes a good person commit murder?
Moffat may have invented a new British crime subgenre with Inside Man: the Noir Farce (you could argue the Coen Brothers did it first in movies) The plot of many farces are kicked off by a character making a bad decision and trying to cover it up by making even more bad decisions until the situation spins out of control. Moffat is a comedy writer at heart – he really can't help being funny. Even when Inside Man gets darkest, his characters still get hilarious dialogue despite themselves. They don't even realise they're being funny, but Moffat does. He plays with subversions and reversals – the English vicar is considered the moral centre of a community but sinks into moral depravity (and Tennant being the real-life son of a minister, should know that vocation inside-out) Tucci's death row detective positions himself as a grim moral centre judging the worth of the cases brought to him and the people involved. And the grimness is skin-deep, a fun thought experiment about morality and murder.
Inside Man could be a companion piece to Moffat's stage play The Unfriend, one of the funniest plays in recent years, a satire about the British fear of embarrassment even in the face of danger and potential murder, that's premiering in London's West End next year. It's too bad most of us won't get to see it unless someone decides to film it and put it on a streamer.
Inside Man is now streaming on Netflix outside the UK.
Inside Man
8/10
Steven Moffat's Inside Man tackles the dark, grim British crime drama and turns it into an endlessly entertaining and darkly hilarious tale of murder, and may have invented a new subgenre in the process: "Noir Farce."
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