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Iit’s clear within minutes of Steven Moffat’s latest venture, Douglas canceled, that he’s set out to slaughter every liberal/leftist/whackist cow (delete as per personal definition – one of the main themes of this drama is that no longer we can depend on the words or the meaning), then tear them apart.
Douglas played by Hugh Bonneville, is the older male half of the nation’s favorite television news couple. His co-host on the couch is Madeline (Karen Gillen), a 30-year-old hottie who keeps the dads watching. It has been, is, and apparently always will be.
Producer Toby (Ben Miles), who keeps a close eye on everything, especially the precise measure of chemistry between Douglas and Madeline and their social media following, is having the time of his life as a modern-day Cromwell, ever on the alert, forever anticipating trouble and trying to stop it when the source to protect his king. He was the first to see the tweet that lit the fuse for Moffat’s masterfully controlled four-episode disaster explosion. Or at least it is for the first two episodes available for review. I hope it doesn’t fall apart like his last outing. It’s much denser than Inside Man – you can imagine Moffat being much more interested in this endlessly fascinating and fertile subject, which is so close to home for white male writers of a certain age, than he was in the more general a story of a vicar undone by good intentions.
Douglas, it seems, was overheard making a sexist joke at a wedding. The joke isn’t repeated – it’s just described as sexist. He doesn’t remember doing it. His friends and colleagues believe it was probably just one of his “usual”.
Toby asks Douglas for an account of events. Account. “Then we can move in the direction of honesty… The truth is useful, but I prefer something a little more balanced. We’re in the news.”
Thus begins the madness. When Madeline retweeted the tweet with the message – “Don’t believe this. Not my co-host” – this of course goes viral. Douglas believes it was an unfortunate but well-intentioned mistake. His wife (Alex Kingston), a hurricane woman and fabulously unscrupulous newspaper editor, reads him quite differently. “I can’t believe he did that! Not my co-host!” This is the first of what will become a maelstrom of competing narratives and powerful ambiguities that allow Moffat to poke fun at the mess the modern world is in and point to the deep dangers, which he wears. There’s a beautifully chilling scene between Douglas and his daughter (“And an activist!”) Claudia (Madeleine Power, wonderful in her first major screen role), which is a gloriously perfect riot of youthful idealism, hypocrisy, pathological confidence and maddening ignorance (“You want a list of countries where homosexuality is actually punishable by death?” “Why not?” “Because it’s racist”). Father and daughter have a brief bonding moment, and Claudia tells him she hopes everything works out — because, she adds, “I really, really don’t want to have to cancel on you.”
Douglas is questioned about how so much power ended up in the wrong – “wrong”? – hands and how can any kind of order be maintained when assertion and interpretation are everything and facts and evidence are nothing.
Meanwhile, Toby is busy trying to accumulate “clear, direct information that reflects the truth without necessarily being so.” And Madeline emerges as a potential threat. Whether she is a manipulative careerist, simply sick of the sexism that surrounds her, or motivated by genuine grievance is the question that has been piling up around her. Gillen’s magnificent performance—in a show full of them—keeps all the possibilities in play.
Douglas canceled is not always subtle. There are clunky lines (Sheila likens Claudia’s university to a cult, “but you still have to do their laundry”) and the casual sense that Moffat is working off a checklist of sensitive topics so he can be sure he’s covered them all. But all in all, it’s fast, fun, and absolutely furious. Some viewers will love it unreservedly, some will love it all but the parts where it takes aim at the beliefs they hold, some will hate it unreservedly for reasons they can clearly articulate, and others will hate it because it dares to exists. The very presence of jokes about various shibboleths will be seen as support for bigots, fascists and right-wingers by some and as a welcome return to sanity by others. That’s the point.
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Douglas Is Canceled aired on ITV1 and is now on ITVX.
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