The other day, from this pulpit, I was pontificating about Netflix. The gist was that Glow, recently arrived on the service, is good, but the quality if Netflix original productions is so wobbly, it can be hard to discern the point of some content.
Gypsy (starts streaming Netflix, Friday, June 30th) is on-point with that pontificating. One can see the reason for it, but that reason is so far off on the horizon, somewhat foggily visible. If you're into a tense but rambling and vaguely erotic psychological thriller, it might work for you. Just allow for a very, very slow burn.
The series boasts a good cast, with Naomi Watts playing Jean Holloway, a haute-bourgeois therapist who, from the get-go, is all too obviously a bit bored with her life and the rather feeble traumas her patients relay to her. For instance, a guy, her patient, loves a woman but she breaks it off. The guy is a bit obsessed and needs to talk about it all the time. That woman he misses was just so passionate.
Jean lives one of those glossy lives that only exists in home-decorating magazines and, well, she's looking for trouble. She's looking for passion. It comes as no surprise when her husband Michael (Billy Crudup) raises his eyebrows and casually asks, "You're not getting emotionally involved again, are you?" She is.
"The more you watch someone, the more you realize people are never who they say they are," Jean intones wispily over the opening scenes. Soon after, she's in a coffee shop and giving her name as "Diane." Clearly, and this isn't foggily transmitted at all, the therapist is also someone who isn't what she seems. She has secrets and is thrilled by the idea of a having a double life. Jean is a sociopath who gets her kicks from slipping into the day-to-day lives of her patients to manipulate scenarios and shift the dynamic. It will end badly, of course.
Right there we have the basis for a short, snappy thriller about this therapist who is living on the edge and about to tumble into very dangerous territory. However, the thing about Gypsy is that the viewer gets impatient with the slow, slow-burning narrative. This is a 10-part drama that would make an excellent, taut six-part thriller. That's a Netflix thing – one suspects there is so much money being thrown around that the impulse towards extravagant length trumps the pragmatism of pith.
At the same time, there are pleasures to be found in the dozily paced Gypsy. Created and directed by women – Lisa Rubin wrote and Sam Taylor-Johnson directs – the series lavishes time on the troubling undercurrents that murmur under Jean's picture-perfect life. She's a mother whose little girl needs the explanation of what the word "sexy" means. She's a wife who has a simmering resentment of the close relationship between her husband and his personal assistant. But other people pay her for guidance. Jean is ready to ramble into danger and explode.
Gypsy commands the audience's complicity if it is to work. You must accept that the triviality of bourgeois life is ultimately profound when the protagonist has power over other people from the ultimate sanctity of the therapist's chair in the therapist's office. You must be okay with the idea that tiny slights from serving staff in a restaurant amount to a great catastrophe for some people. To be clear – there's a dangerous erotic edge to Gypsy from the start, when Jean begins stalking Sidney (Sophie Cookson), the ex-girlfriend that one of her clients is obsessed with. Sidney's just a free-spirited kid working in a coffee shop. What obsesses Jean, exactly, seems disturbingly carnal and wrong.
Wish I could tell you Gypsy is a great thriller worth binge-watching on a summer weekend. It's not that, at all, unless you are obsessed with therapy. It's too slow. It's very smart about the chaos of lusts – both innocent and and sinister – that lurk under a veneer of middle-class stability, but it takes so long to stir its engine, it just stalls.
If you are searching for a substantial drama and you subscribe to Super Channel, then check out National Treasure, which us now on-demand. Made by Channel 4 in Britain, the four-part drama is inspired by Operation Yewtree, the British police investigation into the sexual abuse perpetrated by Jimmy Savile and allegations against other TV and media personalities there. Robbie Coltrane plays Paul Finchley, a beloved veteran comedian accused of sex offences. It is terrifyingly ambiguous, sinister and raw. Robbie Coltrane, all coiled rage and vulnerability, will take your breath away.