You don’t have to see the beautifully simple opening credits – a vase of flowers exploding in mesmeric slow motion – to suspect that the 10-part drama The Legacy (Sky Arts, Thursday) is worth watching. It’s about a dysfunctional family, which makes a change from forensics, a quirky pair of cops, and a woman suffering a graphically violent murder. And who doesn’t love a layered tale of siblings’ secrets and lies?
The Legacy, from the producers of The Killing and Borgen, promises an engrossing and intelligent drama. Even after hours of Scandi TV, tak is the only word that's stuck. But no one is very agreeable in this latest Danish import, so "thanks" doesn't get an airing very often.
The Legacy (or Arvingerne for showoffs) was an enormous hit in Denmark, and after the first episode it's easy to see why. The story begins with Veronika Grønnegaard (Kirsten Olesen), a famous artist, leaving an oncology appointment, and pausing to light up a cigarette before heading home to her beautiful mansion filled with her art and student helpers. Veronika is dead by the end of the episode, but not before revealing herself as monstrous, primarily to her devoted doormat of a daughter, the outwardly successful Gro (Trine Dyrholm).
Veronika’s legacy is her art, for which she planned a museum, and her four disconnected adult children by three fathers, a result of her determinedly bohemian lifestyle – her last husband, Thomas, is an eccentric dope-smoking old hippy who lives in a caravan in the grounds. One of her estranged daughters, Signe, has lived all her conventional life in the nearby village with her solid working-class father, who has never revealed that Veronika is her real mother.
The siblings take sides and jockey for position – this time not for their distant mother's affections but for her money, which is a bourgeois response she'd have hated. Frederick's first words on hearing of his mother's death are, "Now I can have the house" – and he's not the most hateful sibling in a quiet, thoughtful drama with a script that, like all good family rows, subtly begs lookers to take sides. Tak to all that.
Dead foreign woman
Two murdered women and two graphically violent attacks on young women. That’s a lot of female-focused brutality in a bare hour of screen time in the first episode of Corp + Anam
(TG4, Thursday). At least the murders occur offscreen in this new series of the Irish-language dramas. The first dead woman is simply “foreign”; she’s quickly forgotten by everyone. And there’s an aerial shot of the other woman’s half-naked body in a ghost estate. But the attacks in the women’s homes are nastily realistic, more
CrimeC
all
than cinematic drama.
Violence against women drives the plot of much TV crime drama and crime fiction; taking that as a reality of the genre, other elements – plot, character development and strong storytelling – have to give it context. The Fall (RTÉ, BBC) has shown terrifying levels of violence (last season at least), but it's part of a taut, character-driven drama, so I can live with it. Not so Corp + Anam, which mistakes gratuitous violence for grittiness.
The main character is a television crime reporter, Cathal Mac Iarnáin (Diarmuid de Faoite). Cathal is wide-eyed, overwrought and hopeless on detail. The plot turns on the revelation that one of the victims is 17, something Mac Iarnáin should have known, as he has been reporting on the case for months. And that’s just one problem in a script that has more holes than a moth-eaten jumper.
Corp + Anam also jars in its attempts to be campaigning. The young woman in the opening scene agrees to give evidence against her boyfriend. But he's released on bail, so there's a clunky subplot smothered in studied worthiness about the Irish justice system letting criminals back out on the streets. The frenetic pace slows only when his estranged wife (Maria Doyle Kennedy) is on screen, because she's one of the few in the cast acting for the camera and not an auditorium.
Maybe the next episode will tone down the gratuitous violence, beef up the plot and make Mac Iarnáin – a believable main character in home-grown drama – reason enough to give it another look, but it’ll be a reluctant one.
Getting a handle on the property market and where it might be heading is like herding cats. In Ireland, What’s Next: The Housing Crisis ( Monday, TV3), Matt Cooper manages to provide a solid overview of what’s happening and why we are where we are – in a right old mess – in this state-of-the-nation documentary.
Cooper talks to every type of stakeholder, from developers to first-time buyers, politicians to economists, brokers to advocates for the homeless. Not to bankers, though, because he says they wouldn’t take part in this otherwise comprehensive film. And that’s a puzzle when they’re all over the media with ever more expensive-looking ad campaigns to flog mortgages.
Cooper heads to Frankfurt to see how the clever Germans do it. There’s a heart- sinking moment as you expect a Teutonic lecture along the lines of how, if we weren’t all such potato-munching spendthrifts obsessed with owning where we live, we could be proper Europeans – which is to say renters – and all would be well.
It turns out (and Cooper seems a teeny bit gleeful at this) that things aren’t so great in the German property market. Sure, tenants enjoy a raft of enviable, family-facilitating protections. But money is cheap (what got us into so much trouble), and for three years there has been a growing trend towards buying, with rents rising beyond the reach of ordinary workers, who must now spend a disproportionate part of their wages on rent.
What's Next succeeds as a snapshot in time rather than an editorial axe to grind. Back home, the impression left after all that information is that there is no one solution to a housing crisis that is rapidly building up on the terrifyingly solid foundation of a lack of supply for buyers and high rents for tenants.
The strongest message from Cooper’s report it that only coherent Government action across banking, tax, planning and public-housing policy can stop what is rapidly becoming a huge problem. After an hour of hearing all the problems in the property market, the film stays true to its solid reporting style and resists ending on an optimistic note. tvreview@irishtimes.com
