But then again, the charge that comes off the screen two minutes into the first episode when Sevigny is shown in a full body shot getting into the shower, all her parts exposed, is such that it can sustain the sort of laconic storytelling that follows, and maybe even necessitates it lest things get too campy. Sevigny stars as Mia, whom we see murder someone, step into the shower in the altogether, and find out she has a son in the series' first five minutes. When Mia goes out to see her child for the first time, she discovers his mother has died, leaving Mia with guardianship of her four children, ranging in ages from about 5 to 17 and in attitudes from welcoming to horrible.
And the ex just died of cancer. She goes to investigate the son and finds him in a farm house with 3 other siblings. The remainder of the series deals with how Mia attempts to take care of this group of children.
She herself is so broken that she has a hard time with the simplest things as far as child care. The children are all grieving and each has problems of their own. It all boils under the surface with missteps and mistakes all round. Trust builds between them slowly.
The younger children are still open and expressive, which is the glue that binds them all together. Mia meets a local man named Ben Jonas Armstrong with whom she shares some moments of joy and a dollop of emotional pain because of her gender identity.
The series is beautifully acted. The series was created by Paul Abbott. She once again proves that she is of the top tier of actors working today. This makes me wonder - what will she do next? So if you like things that are not your typical TV drama, then watch this show.
Just don't be surprised if, like the characters themselves, you end up with mixed feelings. Details Edit. Release date May 22, United Kingdom. United Kingdom. AbbottVision United Kingdom. Abbott Vision Red Production Company. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 45 minutes. Related news. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Edit page. I realise that this is the acid test of a successful transsexual, but even when Mia showed us her penis in the shower credits for prosthetics artist and prosthetics supervisor were well earned , it was a hard one to swallow, if you'll pardon the inescapable metaphor.
Put bluntly, she still seemed more like a woman with a willy than a man with breasts. The scene, along with Sevigny's serviceable Irish accent I would have paid to hear her Manchester one , brought to mind Neil Jordan's gender-bent IRA thriller The Crying Game , which cast a male actor as a pre-op transsexual man, and to invite comparisons there may be as much a hostage to fortune as the title of this six-part series, created by Paul Abbott , whose State of Play is a high water mark of British TV drama though he is better known for Shameless.
But this first episode had enough to recommend it. There were one or two cliches of the genre the gravel-voiced criminal kingpin in the bowels of his nocturnal lair was one but it was well shot, scripted and acted, and didn't take all day skating around the point. Sevigny has a pitiless quality as evidenced in her recent complaint that Manchester was the grimmest place she had ever been that must be a help if you're a killing machine, and her trademark bruised expression offered a fair enough sense of a woman with a past.
It wasn't long before it caught up with her, courtesy of an ex-partner, Wendy, from long ago, now dead of cancer and bequeathing Mia the care of a houseful of grubby children one of them fathered by her when she was more of a him subsisting in some bleak rural hinterland. The children, headed by a scowling older teen girl, understandably didn't want an unknown interfering guardian who was neither one thing nor the other in the house, though they did need someone to pay the electricity bill and Mia didn't drive a swanky Merc for nothing.
Would Mia's maternal instinct be kicking in? Was she a woman of two halves in more ways than one? There was a local thug to deal with, and his son, the local bully, but these were questions to be answered with violence.
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