Curfew is a counterfactual. But instead of positing a world in which Hitler was killed at birth or John F Kennedy was not assassinated, Paramount’s drama, adapted from Jayne Cowie’s book After Dark, imagines a world in which women are safe. Or, at least, in which extraordinary measures have been taken to curtail male violence and prioritise women’s security.
Men are electronically tagged and live under a 12-hour curfew. From 7pm to 7am, they cannot leave home. If they do, police cars descend and they are swiftly arrested. In one of many extreme suspensions of disbelief we are asked to make, this system is, it seems, foolproof.
So, when a woman is killed during curfew hours – her body dragged and left outside the Women’s Safety Centre – and the investigating officer proclaims that the brutality of the murder means that only a man could have done it, she is roundly pooh-poohed. It is suggested that DI Pamela Green’s judgment is skewed because she is the mother of the last woman killed by a man before curfew was enacted. But Pam is played by Sarah Parish and therefore no amount of aspersions cast upon her professionalism are going to dissuade her from her theory or stop her pursuing the case with a determined frown on her face.
From there, it is standard thriller fare. Secret relationships are uncovered that provide some suspects – some quickly dismissed, others hanging around a little longer. There is Sarah (Mandip Gill), who is burdened by an ex-husband who has recently been released from prison after a sentence for breaking curfew, a resentful teenage daughter, Cass (Imogen Sandhu), who doesn’t believe he deserved his punishment, and a lawsuit, after she used a stun gun on an apparent client at work. There is a confession that Pam doesn’t believe. Rather late in the day, a detagging machine is found to have gone missing from the Women’s Safety Centre, which means any number of men could be roaming the streets. Pam’s theory is bolstered.
But! The higher-ups don’t want it known that the system can fail – not just before a vote that will make the curfew permanent. Soon Pam will be frowning more determinedly than ever. And that is before we add in the “incel”-stuffed men’s rights movement bent on causing havoc before the vote, in that supremely rational way they have.
Along the way, we are given gobbets of exposition, usually via Cass’s civics class, in which they are taught statistics on male violence against women. They learn how people used to talk in terms of how many women had been raped instead of how many rapists there were, “as if rape was something that just happened”. The students argue about whether this is reason enough to restrict all men’s freedom and how you balance the different needs of the sexes with their shared human rights. It’s interesting stuff and the points are valid, but it makes you feel as if you are in the classroom, too, instead of watching a drama that has taken the narrative sine qua non: “Show don’t tell.”
The world-building, too, is disappointingly sketchy. Screen adaptations can go further than the source material (so much more can be quickly evoked visually than described), but Curfew has wasted this opportunity. Apart from the existence of counselling sessions to get cohabitation certificates before couples (presumably heterosexual only – but gay men are tagged, so who knows?) are allowed to live together, a few scenes of women enjoying being out after dark and a man in therapy undergoing pain simulation, there is not much sign of the radically different Britain that would be brought about by such new laws. Or, indeed, that would have to have arrived before they could be contemplated.
Nor does the series answer many of the questions that fill the viewer’s head as soon as the premise is known – such as how the curfew stops violence at home and why men, apparently, kill only at night.
Despite wasted opportunities, Curfew is a perfectly serviceable crime drama. And it does, as various suspects come in and out of focus, make the important point that predators will crawl through the tiniest of loopholes. Curfew or not, they walk among us. Even a counterfactual can’t imagine otherwise.
• Curfew is available on Paramount+
