The Hour
The Hour is greater than the sum of its parts, which isn’t to say that it’s great, exactly. It has a lot of problems: anachronistic language; feet-planted speechifying, also rather anachronistic, about marriage and the press and women in the workplace; a When Harry Met Sally-ish friendship between a man and a woman that you could buy as of its time, to a point, if it didn’t feel done to death in any era. Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai mostly sell the friendship between Freddie and Bel — Whishaw’s delivery is too actor-y in other subplots at times, but in scenes with Garai, he’s toned down and real — but The Hour feels like a standard workplace drama that simply wanted to put its players in ’50s clothes and eliminate the internet from the plotting.
Fair enough, and a good spy story is a more than valid excuse, but said plotting also has pacing problems, particularly towards the end. The lead-up to the climactic final episode of the show within the show never caught fire…and then all of a sudden Clarence is sobbing around a mouthful of exposition? And could the BBC free up a few pounds sterling for some goddamn lip balm already? This, Sherlock, the Inspector Lynley films — half the cast in a given Beeb drama is no more than a plosive away from splitting a bottom lip. Bonne Bell, Britannia. Figure it out.
But despite the incorrect phrasings, the chappedness, the talky hand-holding, I really liked it. It’s nice to look at, it moves right along for the most part, Anna “Duckface” Chancellor is a hardboiled pleasure as Lix Storm, and it sucked me in. I hadn’t realized before starting the series that it had gotten promoted as the British answer to Mad Men, but while I can see how that might lead to some disappointment, 1) Mad Men is not without its own flaws; and 2) high dudgeoneer Norman Lebrecht, balefully condemning The Hour as “aesthetically offensive to anyone who cares about accuracy,” may have missed the point by juuuuust a degree or two. The Hour has an energy to it. It has a story, and a story within a story, that it wants to tell, and it tries to get that done by whatever means. Unfortunately, that can mean the occasional drama-club moment in which two characters tell each other things they already know, or an editing fail in the attempt to time the shows to each other — but then it just goes on to the next thing. There’s something to be said in not getting bogged down with argot flashcards.
Evidently a second season is a go. I look forward to seeing where it goes next. No, it’s not Mad Men. Most TV isn’t. But The Hour is entertaining, which most TV also isn’t, so if you don’t think you’ll have a seizure when “reference” is futuristically used as a verb (I…know), give it a spin.
Tags: Anna Chancellor Ben Whishaw Benedict Cumberbatch calm down Norman Lebrecht Chapstick Inspector Lynley Mysteries Mad Men pretension Romola Garai The Hour TV
I liked this series with about the same level of ‘oh, okay, some fun!’ and ‘yeah, not so much with the 50s there’ you describe. Guffaws when Freddie carries a modern folding umbrella to the meet with the widow, f’rinstance. What, the props department couldn’t find a proper cane-handled non-folder? In freaking London?!
I’m not a big fan of Garai’s and I’ve actively loathed her in lots of stuff. I keep waiting for her to grow out of that middle-school drama class tic of bending forward to deliver ‘important’ lines, and she keeps not growing out of it. (Some directors shoot around it better than others.) On the upside, she was wardrobed beautifully, rocked what she wore, and I was covetous more than once of her lipstick.
Chancellor was both well cast and awesome.
But why does everybody have such tiny beds? I hope that’s historically accurate, because it sure looks difficult to navigate a sleepover…
It’s been well-established that spew a British accent at me and I’ll watch anything you want me to, even shit I normally would have zero interest in (hellooooo, Almost Human). Throw in some When Harry Met Sally In Journo School and yeah, I’m in. Love Duckface (Poor Anna Chancellor. Is she known by anything else? No.) and while I was totally prepared to hate Hector, Dominic West is just way too charming. Oona Chaplin is delish as the UK’s answer to Trudy Campbell.
I love it, and I’m excited for next season – sorry, the next SERIES. I’m hoping for more longing looks from Ben Whishaw. They make my clothes fall off.
Hee. No. Certainly not by me, at any rate. I’ve even been known to call out other actresses for not being Duckface, where I think someone Chancellor-esque might be called for. (I’m looking at you, Eve Best in The King’s Speech.)
It sounds like I might have to check this one out. I’ve never entirely made up my mind about Garai. I initially liked her in Atonement — or I maybe I just hated her a lot less than almost anybody in that mess. I dunno.
Despite watching all six episodes, I could just never get into the show. I felt like it had originally been conceived as two different shows–one about the rise of television news and another about British KGB spies, and then the creator thought “I’ll just combine the two!” Freddy was always on such a different track from everyone else and the two storylines so rarely intersected that it got frustrating.
Also, I could not stand the constant, obsessive need to inform the audience that Freddy is a good person. I adore Ben Whishaw, and I thought he was good in this, but every episode Bel had to say “You’re such a good friend” when he obviously isn’t. It’s one case where I wish they had taken a page out of Mad Men’s book and made the character more Don Draper-ish and presented him as an asshole who’s very good at his job.
made the character more Don Draper-ish and presented him as an asshole who’s very good at his job
Yeah, that would have worked better…except that he needed to be better at his job as well. We were told that a bunch of times but not necessarily shown, and watching it with an editor hat on was like, man, that kid is more trouble than he’s worth in a deadline setting.
I also suspect the script conflated “doesn’t dismiss Bel based on her gender” with “good friend,” which I think is something that women do in fact do sometimes — but the writing could have made that clearer that that’s why she puts up with his prickly-clingy-prickly-again thing.