The attraction of prison, as a setting for a TV drama, is obvious. It allows viewers to reflect on the nature of good and evil, realise a sympathy for perpetrators as well as victims, and extend forgiveness, experiencing the pleasure of mercy without its concomitant distress. It is, in short, a perfect moral petri dish, not unlike the cultures examined under the microscope of philosophers like René Descartes, John Locke and Plato. All of this collides in BBC One’s new six-part drama from Dennis Kelly, Waiting for the Out.
Dan (Josh Finan) is a sensitive academic who has begun teaching a beginner class in philosophy at a British prison. With his assembled convicts, he discusses the nature of being, but it is clear that Dan, himself, is searching for something. At home, he’s struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder, which manifests in lengthy checks of his gas hob. At work, the prisoners begin to chip away at repressed memories of his father – himself, an abusive former prisoner – and elder brother Lee (Stephen Wight), who is in recovery from his own addiction issues. “Every generation gets its chance to change,” Lee tells Dan. “Me and you, we’re ours.” But can Dan ever fully escape the psychological confines of his upbringing?
