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| TV,
Jerry Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F2
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Yikes, another show based on a previously successful format – in this case the love it or absolutely goddam loathe it BBC2 sexy lawyer show ‘This Life’. Well I started off hating that, but two seasons in finally fell in with it to the point that I’d watch the repeats just to catch another glimpse of the Miles’s amazing dour facial tics, Kira’s saucy blonde streak and Anna’s gob-attacks. It’s popularity kicked off a stream of good-looking white middle-class London based thirty-something drama shows where the principles wrestle with work and relationship issues when not ‘bonking’ their bosses or each other.
ITV’s addition to the fight is ‘Metropolis’, trumpeted by a series of machine-gun edited sauce n’ snogging trailers. It’s touted as a tougher, harder-edged look at good-looking white middle-class London based thirty-somethings. This means there’s more psychotic behaviour than your usual slice of this stuff. All the guys are teetering on the brink of obsessional-love madness or dropping out of their careers, sitting at home and getting bombed. The girls do their bit by dating their bosses, power-dressing, hitting the gym and eating yogurt.
This would all be fine is it was being played for laughs. But it’s not, it keeps coming at you as ‘serious’ drama. But the writing is too superficial and the characters are just whining New London archetypes. The Indie guy. The hippie guy. The tough brunette. The permanently moany looking blonde. You don’t feel for them, they’re too self-obsessed, plus they’re too good-looking to moan so much.
It’s early days, so perhaps they’ll be changes but they’d have to be pretty radical. Especially when there’s so much else of this stuff that’s better. ‘Hearts and bones’ is nicer, ‘Holding on’ was way harder, and ‘Friends’ is funnier – I know it doesn’t count, but its influence on our UK output is undebatable. So I’ll keep up with this for a couple more episodes, but I reckon it’s going to take the addition of lazer gun battles or DVDA to go beyond that.
TV Mon 22.00 BST Wed 22.30 BST
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