Watch enough TV, and you’ll find yourself put through the emotional wringer like wet Victorian laundry. At times, it feels like every trauma of the human experience can – and must – be brought to vivid life for small screen audiences. Illness or abuse, grief or depression, violence or neglect: you don’t have to leave your living room to run the gamut of psychic wounds. And so, it was with a huge sense of trepidation that I pressed play on BBC One’s new four-part drama, Best Interests, which fictionalises the ultimate nightmare, skulking in the back of every parent’s mind.
Nicci (Sharon Horgan) and Andrew (Michael Sheen) have two daughters: reserved trumpeter Katie (Conversations with Friends’s Alison Oliver) and perpetually upbeat 13-year-old Marnie (Niamh Moriarty), who has an atypical form of muscular dystrophy. The nuclear family’s lives in suburban Cheltenham revolve around Marnie’s care, an orbit that is thrown when a chest infection sends the youngest daughter to the ICU. There, they receive the dreaded news that they’ve spent a decade anticipating. “We think it’s time to discuss whether it’s right to keep treating her,” comes the verdict of Marnie’s doctor Samantha (Noma Dumezweni).
