Boat Story is a very gory, very meta, very fun black comedy
The clever British series, now on Freevee, is as much about thrills as the art of storytelling itself
The first three scenes of Boat Story, a stylish British show that aired on BBC One last year and made it to Freevee in the States last month, feature the following payoffs: a severed head being discovered in an abandoned field; a hand getting crushed in a factory, complete with thick blood slowly oozing down rusty metal machinery; and a fatal knife fight on the high seas in the midst of a storm that ends with the upbeat sounds of Sacha Distel’s “Quand on a le cœur tranquille.” And by the time this particularly twisty boat story ends, we’ve witnessed bodies strung up and treated like human piñatas, a tongue cut out, a head bashed in with a hammer, and many, many gun-downed police officers.
So, is it ridiculously bloody? Absolutely. And yet, Boat Story’s biggest trick—not a particularly new trick but one that’s nonetheless tough to pull off let alone keep up over six hourlong episodes—is how it wraps all that bloodshed and all of those twists in a nice cozy blanket, packing in cleverness, comedic beats, and even pathos as the body count keeps rising.
But first, before we get too far: This story, like most good crime stories, starts incredibly simply, with two complete strangers finding a boat carrying raw cocaine washed up on the beach. Regular folks stumbling onto loot then getting in way over their heads when the criminals who own said loot come calling is a well-worn, effective setup and one we’ve seen plenty, in everything from the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men to Dumb And Dumber.
The regular folks here are Janet (Daisy Haggard, who finished a fantastic four-season run on FX’s Breeders last year and showcases a similar comedic charm in this) and Samuel (Paterson Joseph, perhaps best known by many reading this as Mark’s weird boss in the aughts British comedy staple Peep Show). After some convincing from Samuel, Janet agrees to try to sell off the coke to a wholesale buyer. He needs the money because he gambled his family’s savings away, hence the recent move from London to a seaside town Daisy describes as “the country’s hairiest asshole.” (Samuel retorts, thoughtfully, that “it’s people that make a place,” to which Daisy counters, “Then we’re really fucked.”) Daisy wants enough scratch to pay off her dickhead Born-Again Christian of an ex-husband so she can become the legal guardian of his son.