A dud from the Big Little Lies creator
Over the past few years, TV has become invested in stories about the sexual exploits of the rich and powerful in British society – which also deploy the word “scandal” in the title. A Very English Scandal kicked off the trend in 2018, telling the true-life events of the politician Jeremy Thorpe (Hugh Grant), who plotted to have his ex-lover Norman Josiffe (Ben Whishaw) murdered so as not to thwart his plans to become prime minister. The same producers then followed this up with the glossy A Very British Scandal in 2021, which covered the acrimonious 1963 divorce court case of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll (played by Paul Bettany and Claire Foy), centring around photos of the Duchess engaged in oral sex with an unidentified man.
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Hoping to follow in these shows’ leads, we now have a brand-new tale of sexual deceit – sorry, scandal – to ponder, with the release of Anatomy of a Scandal; no, not the third in a trilogy with the aforementioned dramas, but instead Netflix’s six-parter based on the 2018 thriller of the same name by Sarah Vaughan and produced by Big Little Lies creator David E Kelley. (However it has been mooted as the first season in what is set to be a Netflix anthology series, which will focus on a different scandal each time.)
Unlike the “English” and “British” scandals before, this is a fictional tale, focused on a married MP, James Whitehouse (Rupert Friend), who has an affair with his aide in the hallways of power in Westminster. Author Vaughan says that the character of James was in part inspired by Boris Johnson, telling The Times: “What really struck me was that he didn’t have any compunction about lying… It was very clear that he had a very different moral compass, that he was playing by different rules.” However, UK viewers might at first be forgiven for confusing this story with that of the real-life British MP Matt Hancock: Hancock was found to be having an affair with his aide during the pandemic, with grainy CCTV footage of him fondling his mistress in his Westminster office released to nationwide mockery. But any such parallels quickly disappear as the plot takes a much darker turn, when the aide, Olivia Lytton (Naomi Scott), accuses James of raping her in a lift in Parliament.
What follows is a clunky psychological thriller and courtroom drama, as James’s bland but adoring wife, Sophie Whitehouse (Sienna Miller), deals with their “perfect” family life imploding, while the prosecuting QC, Kate Woodcroft (Michelle Dockery), is also struggling with the biggest court case of her career and the impact it has on her personal life.
Kelley – who has co-written this alongside Melissa James Gibson (House of Cards), with SJ Clarkson (Jessica Jones, Succession) directing – may have crossed the Atlantic, but, as with his US shows like Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers and The Undoing, his focus is still on the upper echelons of society. Unfortunately, the dialogue and action feel unnatural from the start; it’s very English people doing things American people think very English people do – men wandering around in bowler hats and bow ties, drinking copious amounts of whisky in offices, and plummily wishing colleagues a “glorious” weekend.
Platform: Netflix
Number of episodes: Six
Directed by: SJ Clarkson
Starring:
Rupert Friend
Sienna Miller
Michelle Dockery
Start date: 15 April 2022
The main characters are unappealing and out of touch, with precious few redeeming features for either of the Whitehouses, even if we’re supposed to empathise with Sophie. When the court case begins, so do the misty flashbacks. We’re shown the Whitehouses’ meet-cute at Oxford University (of course); their love story must be the only one in history that starts with “anal chugging”, as James is revealed to be part of the Libertine fraternity, based on the real-life rich-boy Bullingdon Club. With bum cheeks drenched in beer in the background, Sophie swoons at James nonetheless.
We learn that James and his old friend, the Conservative Prime Minister, Tom Southern (Geoffrey Streatfeild) have a shared history and dark secrets from their time at university, but we also witness Sophie’s offensive behaviour from an early age too – exploiting a study partner into doing her academic coursework for her. As the drama moves into the courtroom, it’s James under the microscope for his actions – but Sophie now starts to question not only the man she’s been married to for 12 years, but what she’s chosen to ignore. “Whitehouses always come out on top!” her two kids chant alongside their dad in their creepy but darkly fitting family mantra, as, in a scene at home, James cheats at Monopoly again, with a get-out-of-jail card kept in his wallet.
It’s a consent case where we are told almost nothing about the victim – we see Olivia only being questioned in court, or in flashbacks that borrow from The Affair’s handbook in differing slightly according to different characters – so our point of entry is Sophie. The real hardship of this case, it seems to imply, is that she finally has to see her husband as the rest of the world does.
The drama is punctuated by unintentionally hilarious bits of direction – in the first episode when James is told by police that he’s been accused of rape, there’s an imagined sequence in which the force of the news throws him up in the air and he falls slo-mo back to the ground. It’s an inflated, heavy-handed visual shorthand for being gut-punched, but it’s not the only time the device is used in the series.
Sophie, after being remarkably laissez-faire about her husband’s infidelity at first, by episode two finds herself suddenly so tormented she runs out of a court, the camera running rings around her. What follows is a bizarre montage of imagined distressful moments involving the lift sex scene – and Sophie falling slo-mo on to the floor of the courthouse. After Googling a photo of her husband’s mistress, she throws up on her iPhone; another ham-fisted way to make the emotion more palpable or visceral that actually just ends up being laughable. It doesn’t help that the adaptation of a very similar story – 2017’s Emmy-nominated Apple Tree Yard, also taken from a novel – worked vastly better.
Rupert Friend plays the glib and odious James with gusto, while Miller goes from playing Sophie as flat, almost devoid of emotion, to overwrought. Like Nicole Kidman as Grace Fraser in The Undoing, there’s lots of striding around being breathless in designer trench coats, but little real insight into a traumatised woman whose world is meant to be tumbling down. James’ PR Chris Clarke (Joshua McGuire) has obvious aspirations to be a Malcolm Tucker-esque character, but isn’t delivered the savage wit in the script to pull it off. Dockery puts in a solid performance as the ice-cold QC with a big secret – her post-court sparring with her defence colleague Angela Regan (Josette Simon) add some levity to proceedings – but any weight she brings to the role is often undermined by bizarre direction or cinematography choices: such as the imagined scene where she and James are going head to head in an empty courtroom, circling around each other, with the camera doing a full 360 around them. It’s hard to take seriously. Where A Very British Scandal and A Very English Scandal showed how to treat this kind of subject matter with nuance, this veers into pantomime.
There are twists saved for the final few episodes – which will probably come as no massive shock; no-one’s going to be thrown back on the floor in slo-mo at their reveal. Anatomy of a Scandal will probably induce a few gasps in viewers, but not for the reason it hopes.
★★☆☆☆
Anatomy of a Scandal streams on Netflix from 15 April.
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