The brazenly ludicrous TV thriller has its place. Sometimes it’s fun to throw all logic and sense to the wind and surrender to a bananas plot whose twists and turns – which play out amid huge, aspirationally spotless homes and gorgeous vistas – are so entertaining and hilariously camp that you end up glued to the screen. Unfortunately, Playing Nice does not fit this mould. Yes, it’s a frantically tense drama, set in a beautiful location, that teems with preposterous coincidences and plot developments. But it is also a story about forcibly removing preschoolers from their parents and exposing them to potentially mortal danger at the hands of a disturbed sociopath. Which, you know, isn’t really my idea of a laugh.
Playing Nice – adapted by Grace Ofori-Attah (Malpractice) from the book by JP Delaney, whose novel The Girl Before was also turned into a disappointing BBC drama – does have a compelling moral conundrum at its core. The Rileys – restaurateur-chef Maddie (Niamh Algar), stay-at-home dad Pete (James Norton, slipping in and out of a strangely high-pitched Cornish accent) and their son Theo – are a picture of down-to-earth familial joy. Until, that is, the hospital phones to inform them that Theo isn’t their biological child: recent genetic testing on another boy suggests two premature babies got mixed up in a neonatal intensive care unit three years ago. Although this is incredibly unlikely in reality (and the show’s eventual explanation for the swap is nowhere near convincing enough), it taps into a primal fear: which new mother semi-delirious with exhaustion on the postnatal ward hasn’t fleetingly feared such a scenario? And the upshot – that two couples each feel a deep-seated connection towards both children – is a complex and fascinating ethical puzzle that a better drama might have dug into. But Playing Nice – if this wasn’t already abundantly clear – is a very bad drama.
