Hacks (Amazon Prime) | amazon.co.uk
Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars (BBC One) | iPlayer
Falklands War: The Untold Story (Channel 4) | channel4.com
Open House: The Great Sex Experiment (Channel 4) | channel4.com
I’ve been drooling out of both sides of my mouth since hearing about Hacks, the award-garlanded dramedy, created by Lucia Aniello, Paul W Downs and Jen Statsky (all involved in Broad City, originally shown on Comedy Central). It has finally reached these shores (via Amazon Prime) almost a year after its launch in the US.
Jean Smart (Mare of Easttown; Fargo) won a Golden Globe and an Emmy for her portrayal of veteran Las Vegas comic Deborah Vance, whose career has become a death rattle of sparkly trouser suits, dusty one-liners and QVC hustles. With her Vegas residency threatened, Vance comes across as an upcycled Norma Desmond meets a crankier Joan Rivers: there’s the sulphurous whiff of faded glories as she shuffles around her plasterboard Versailles mansion, but she’s damned if she’s going to go quietly. Enter Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), a twentysomething LA writer, who’s tanked her career with an ill-judged tweet and who tells Vance at their fractious first meeting: “The last thing on Earth I want to do is move to the desert to write lame jokes for an old hack.”
What unfolds is an odd-couple generational psychodrama cum showbiz redemption story that runs on fear – of ageing and failure – but stamps on sentimentality with hobnail boots. Set mainly on the boulevard of slot machines and shattered dreams that is Vegas, over 10 episodes, Hacks is chock-full of scene-stealers, including Deborah’s dizzy daughter (Kaitlin Olson), and the sparky double act of agent Jimmy and assistant Kayla, played by Downs and Megan Stalter.
But it’s Smart and Einbinder’s spreading bruise of a relationship that keeps you riveted. Comedies about comedy sometimes choke on their own meta – is it funny or “funny”? – but here, the creative grind is only the start. Daniels may be a know-it-all Gen Z-er who despairs of her new gig (“Ava, she needs jokes on side salad”), but she has the fresh eye (comedy, feminism, life) Vance needs. Vance might be a muumuu-clad monster, but she’s also a shrewd motivational fireball, at one point hissing at Daniels: “You have to scratch and claw and it never fucking ends!” There’s a mid-series lull, where the intense comic energy slumps, but, generally, Hacks socks a vigorous tragicomic punch. Transcending the average dramedy, it evolves into an examination of co-dependency writ large on Vegas billboards; blood on the dressing room floor.
Has TV chef Gordon Ramsay finally stopped shouting? Watching his new BBC One eight-part series, Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars, I was struck by the eerie calm and that’s factoring in Ramsay making an entrance by jumping into the Cornish sea from a helicopter.
The point, it seems, is “leaps of faith” and, soon enough, 12 food and drink entrepreneurs are throwing themselves from Cornish rocks into seawater to avoid getting sent home first and to prove they’re worthy of the final prize of Ramsay’s £150,000 investment. “My own money!” he keeps insisting, as if unable to believe it himself.
Some of the entrepreneurs are vegan, which surprises me: I remember Ramsay, years ago, on a previous show, tricking a vegetarian man into eating Parma ham on a pizza, behaviour that was… (excuse me, the lawyers need a word)… erm, entirely open to your own personal interpretation. It seems either Ramsay is a changed man or he’s belatedly twigged the worth of the tempeh pound. As for the shouting, Ramsay’s onscreen eruptions were once infamous, but, here, he seems more measured and therefore more credible and watchable.
Food Stars itself comes across as somewhat derivative – The Apprentice with a full tummy and a pinch of Million Pound Menu thrown in? – but it’s not without interest and amusement. Watching contestants compete by running street-food stalls on the beach, “strong characters” (let’s call them that) are already starting to emerge amid the mounds of soggy tacos and overpriced toasties. While this show is ostensibly about food, we’ll doubtless be watching for the folly and misguided ambition.
Considering global events right now, Harvey Lilley’s feature-length documentary, Falklands War: The Untold Story (Channel 4) made for sobering viewing. Certainly, there seemed little of the wearisome triumphalism that was around at that time as mainly military types, including General Sir Michael Rose (the SAS leader who negotiated the Argentinian surrender), looked back on Britain’s conflict with Argentina, 40 years on.
It made for an unflinching, raw 90 minutes, with mistakes and those who made them rigorously criticised, justifiably so, considering the hundreds of casualties. Elsewhere, there were chilling accounts of miscommunication, dysfunctional chains of command, men forced to “wing it” and comrades who tragically didn’t survive, while Argentinian participants gave their own views. As people told their stories in this documentary, some for the very first time, there was a feeling of grief and sorrow, but also relief: the sense of a locked and rusty MoD door being yanked open after a very long time.
On to the new Channel 4 series, Open House: The Great Sex Experiment, which features couples interested in polyamory, threesomes, group sex and the like as part of committed relationships. I was hoping to feel deeply morally offended – TV critics get our kicks where we can – but the first episode was responsibly executed, with couples mixing at “socials” with “sexually liberated” residents and progress overseen by specialist relationship therapist Lori Beth Bisbey. There isn’t even much nudity, give or take the odd shot of male buttocks in the night-vision murk.
Confusingly, there’s no mention of swinging – even historically – is the “s” word banned now? Moreover, at times, the exercise feels over-polite, even corporate, as though human sexuality could somehow be processed and admin-ed. Still, serious points are made about liberation and its evil twin, sexual jealousy. When a young Welsh couple try a threesome, the man emerges feeling like a “spare part” and the couple tetchily argue in the dark. (Don’t worry: they go on to have successful threesomes.) Thus far, I’m not sure what Open House… is precisely saying about open relationships, but it’s nice to know that romance isn’t dead, it’s just wearing furry handcuffs and refusing to be oppressed by societal mores.
What else I’m watching…
Slow Horses
(Apple TV+)
Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Jack Lowden star in an espionage drama, based on the Mick Herron book. Sidelined MI5 screw-ups become embroiled in a gritty operation involving an abducted Muslim student threatened with public decapitation.
Servant of the People
(All 4)
The intriguing, amusing, and highly prescient comedy series, starring the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as… the president of Ukraine. Whereas before it was only possible to view the opening three episodes, now the entire first series is available.
Banned! The Mary Whitehouse Story
(BBC Two)
A two-part documentary on the anti-permissive campaigner and self-styled voice of the moral majority who became a national household name. While the ultra-religious Whitehouse was much derided and lampooned, some now seek to re-evaluate her contributions.
