Steven Moffat has a way with crackling dialogue—or at least he certainly does in Douglas Is Cancelled, a four-part miniseries that aired on ITV1 last summer in the U.K. and makes its way to the States on BritBox this month. In the latest from the Doctor Who and Sherlock scribe, characters talk at such a rapid clip and so articulately and cleverly that at times it feels like the pitch for the show was “Sports Night but about cancel culture.” For as much as the project is planted in the politics of the here and now (Douglas’ daughter Claudia, played by Madeleine Power, tosses in “okay Boomer” and “ooh, it’s so good to be mansplained” in her first scene alone), the lines are decidedly retro, with so little breathing room between each one that the conversations recall not just Aaron Sorkin’s quarter-century-old TV output but also, if only in its motormouthed spirit, the sparkling scripts by long-gone masters like Preston Sturges.
The Douglas in question is played by Hugh Bonneville, who was last seen on U.S. small screens in late January in the knottily plotted—and really good—series The Agency. Douglas apparently made a misogynistic joke while drunk at a wedding—one of the jokes of the show is that, for so much of its runtime, we never actually hear it, only thoughts on what it could be and how to handle its fallout—and somebody tweeted about it. When his co-anchor on the news program Live At 6, Madeline (Karen Gillan of the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies, who gives an applaudably wide-ranging performance) retweets that tweet to her two-million followers, the vague rumor becomes a thing, with nice-guy Douglas ill-equipped for how to deal with it, leaving Bonneville with the task of making his face varying shades of confounded.
Douglas’ wife Sheila (ER’s Alex Kingston), on the other hand, sees that this little tweet could potentially ruin her family, what with her being the editor of a newspaper and having seen this story play out so many times—and, likely, been the deciding vote that made those stories unfold in the press in the first place. “Darling, there is all the human misery and suffering a journalist could wish for, but we live in a world where a newsreader’s ass could push a world war off the front page,” she exasperatedly explains to him at home. “And you, my dear, whether you like it or not, are in possession of a newsreader’s ass. Handle it with care.” Later in her spiel—one of many in which Moffat’s thoughts about these times bleed through—she divulges, “Here’s the big secret: No one reads the article. They’re all too busy tweeting angry opinions about whatever conclusion they’ve just jumped to. Outrage is exciting. Nuance is work.” And then there’s Live At 6 producer Toby (Ben Miles, from Moffat’s Coupling), who comes off as on-the-ball and cautious as he considers how to spin things when the shit inevitably hits the fan.
But then, in the back half, the show makes something of an about-face, losing a lot of its bubbly banter and instead staging two dramatic, lengthy scenes that each unfold almost like mini plays. One takes place in a hotel room, with a powerful man following a playbook that’s recognizable from the Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose scandals, ceaselessly begging a woman to take a seat and have a drink as he gaslights her with talks of feminism, eventually stripping all but in front of her and taking a bath. And the other chronicles a testy, twisty interview, one that allows Bonneville to snap from lost, “it’s all so ridiculous, isn’t it?” mode into something more pissed and aggressive.
It’s a tonal shift that almost lands. But the workplace-comedy trappings and quips that can make this watch enjoyable—thanks in no small part to the comical turns by Ted Lasso’s Nick Mohammed and House Of The Dragon’s Simon Russell Beale, who play a very unfunny comedy writer and a daffy agent, respectively—often feel at odds with the serious things Moffat is trying to say and portray. And it’s hard not to walk away thinking that another British miniseries, last year’s A Very Royal Scandal, a retelling of Prince Andrew’s catastrophic TV interview, not only got there first—but did it better.
