Broadchurch: do we care that it is becoming implausible?
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Version 0 of 1. Is it plausible that the defence team preparing for a murder trial would order the exhumation of the body of a murdered child without letting his parents know? Unlikely. Is it convincing that bereaved dad Mark Latimer is spending so much time with Tom, his dead son’s best friend whose father has confessed to his murder? I doubt it. Do local papers live blog murder trials? As if. Is it really likely that a heavily pregnant woman would – even in extremis – start a street brawl, particularly if its chief consequence would be to precipitate her waters to break in a lavish manner? Yeah. No. Sure. Maybe. I don’t know. What I do know is that the second series of Broadchurch is getting a lot of heat, particularly on Twitter, for its manifold presumed implausibilities. It’s as if writer Chris Chibnall is Lance Corporal Jones from Dad’s Army and Twitter is Captain Mainwaring, with the latter saying to the former: “You’re going into the realms of fantasy now, Chibnall.” It was procedure in the murder trial that apparently pushed us over the edge. “Not sure about the legal argument in front of the jury. Someone send them a copy of the Criminal Procedure Rules,” tweeted Dominic Casciani, BBC home affairs correspondent, apparently unaware of the inverse relationship between consulting the Criminal Procedure Rules and writing exciting courtroom drama. I found myself shouting at the screen: “Meera Syal? You’re the worst judge ever!” What kind of judge rules a confession to a murder inadmissible on the basis of an attack on the murder suspect by his police officer wife (excuse me while I go into caps-lock hysteria) AFTER HE MADE THE CONFESSION? A telly judge, that’s who. But the ruling typifies what Chibnall is doing in this second series – trying to get somewhere interesting very quickly and riding roughshod over our compunctions about what would happen in real life. Why, after so many months protecting Claire from evil hunkypants Lee, would David Tenant’s detective suddenly broker a meeting between them? Surely not just so Chibnall can get to the interesting point of Claire and Ellie comparing marital traumas, and having his two storylines (the court case and the Lee storyline) intertwine suggestively around each other? Yet I went along with the bravura episode even though it was utterly implausible. Very often, how much implausibility a drama can get away with depends on the investment the audience has made in it. Thus, long-running and much-loved series are accorded more leeway because audiences have invested a lot of time and affection in them. For Broadchurch, it’s different. In part that is because its audience is not as committed yet as that of longer-running dramas. But it is also because some of those complaining about the second series of Broadchurch seem to feel betrayed by the fact that there is a second series at all. Wasn’t it all done and dusted at the end of series one? Isn’t series two just a cynical cash-in on an unexpected success? You buy into something as a one-time drama and it feels special (cf: True Detective). Then it comes back for a second bite of the biscuit and it’s much more vulnerable to audience criticism. It is as if the second time around, we have reset our critical faculties: moving from “lax” to “borderline hostile”. But there is another matter. One of the pleasures of watching purportedly real drama is picking holes in its implausibilities. Sure, you could suspend your disbelief, and that would be fun, but not as much fun as tweeting one’s outrage at the cracks starting to show in a storyline. The pleasure of feeling superior, of knowing better, is intensified in an age when a human’s value can be measured by how many retweets your takedown of Broadchurch got. For my part, I hold it to be a self-evident truth that people who object to inconsistencies between drama and real life risk becoming boring jerks. A classic scene in the Simpsons has fans at an Itchie and Poochie convention complain to the voice artists about the storylines. “In episode 2F09 when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones. I mean, what are we to believe, that this is some sort of a … magic xylophone or something? Gee, I really hope somebody got fired for that blunder.” Admittedly, Broadchurch isn’t Itchie and Poochie. It affects to be real-life drama – but perhaps realism is overrated. Much better to have something utterly implausible wafting on to out screens on Broadchurch, by which I mean Charlotte Rampling with her superb froideur as a prosecuting counsel, even though – in real life – no one would believe she could prosecute her way out of a paper bag, God love her. |