When you walk through the garden...
Collateral (why use a title already associated with a well-known movie?) is unexpectedly excellent. Its premise sounds like a cross between
The Killing and
The Fall, but in execution, it's closer to a miniature, British version of
The Wire. At one point in this four-episode BBC2 miniseries, one character says to another: "People don't trust institutions anymore." It's inevitably a bit on the nose, yet, by that point in the show, it also feels earned, as a direct summation of
Collateral's David Simonesque central themes.
Collateral doesn't just
tell us that institutions--governments, political parties, the police, the Church--fail people, but
shows in persuasive, vividly realized detail how and why they do so, and what the real-world implications of these failures of service and representation are for the lives of individual people. As in
The Wire, what prevents these ideas from ever feeling didactic is pretty good writing and really good acting. Carey Mulligan, always terrific, has probably never been better, but the rest of the show's large ensemble cast is equally strong. The expanding-web-of-interconnections structure that writer-creator David Hare favors is here only minimally schematic and forced, largely because all the characters pulled into his web are so interesting and fully fleshed-out and dynamically played, from the Shadow Cabinet MP at odds with party orthodoxy to the lesbian priest and her young Vietnamese lover to the arrogant, semi-racist MI5 agent swooping in on the local cops' investigation. Right, it's
that kind of show, but--trust me, really--it's so much better than it sounds on the page, and at four hours, it doesn't overextend its myriad plot threads or overstay its welcome. My only complaint is that they could've come up with a more distinctive title for a show this good.
