Television Review: The Hour (Hours Two and Three)

I’ve watched three episodes and I am as ambivalent as I was when The Hour started.  I like it. I don’t like it.  This is a good, solid show that I think could be better. 

I was expecting a British Mad Men, and what I got was a Rubicon flavored spy/mystery filtered through a British version of Broadcast News.  The season finale has already aired, but I’ve yet to see it, I’m watching the shows On-Demand but the DVD set is coming out so in fairness to those who haven’t seen it I’m writing my review Spoiler Free and if I stick to a Broadcast News prism I don’t have to worry about Spoilers.

Oh, and I found a fun connection between Mad Men and The Hour, after the break …

What’s the connection between Mad Men and The Hour?  According to IMDB, in 2004 Romola Garai starred in a movie called Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.  Also in that movie? John Slattery and January Jones.

So between Episode 1 and 2, yours truly did some good old-fashioned research.  Well, it wasn’t terribly good, I only went as far as Wikipedia, and it’s not old-fashioned for the same reason, but it is research.  I looked up the Suez Canal Crisis (which is the focal point of the second episode) and what I got was a reminder once about how badly we Americans are educated.

Never mind the Suez Canal Crisis itself, which I doubt most people on this side of the pond can elucidate upon (myself most egregiously) but in just reading the Wikipedia account itself, there was a disclaimer that the article had a British viewpoint, as if i had to be told; I thrice had to use the dictionary.*
Mind you, this isn’t some scholarly tome, this is a Wikipedia article, yet I struggled to get through it, the same way, perhaps, and for the same reason I struggle with The Hour.  Maybe being a simple dumb American, I’m not good enough to have understood what was going on in the first hour of The Hour.  

All this goes towards illuminating the cultural differences between our peoples.  The show makes no concessions to an audiences’ understanding of the events. It assumes you are familiar with the events and in this manner it is very much like Mad Men; they will not endanger a nuanced script with some exposition for the uneducated.  The thing is the script ain’t all that nuanced and the show doesn’t immerse me in the time period.  I’m simply watching actors in period costumes, sort of like Tony Curtis in Taras Bulba.  Good actors, excellently cast, walking around in good costumes, but try as they do to inject some 50′s flavor into the mise-en-scene, they don’t.

For example, nothing says 1956 like a reference to Bill Hayley records (upon which there has been a wager placed in Episode 2) but they only refer to them, they don’t play them.  They show Freddie lovingly inspecting them, and that’s it. It’s just a missed opportunity;  but again I find myself criticizing the show when it’s not really that bad, but it’s what keeps me from thinking the show is anything other than, OK.

Maybe it’s their budget.  The soundtrack, continuing the example, is for the most part jazzy, annoyingly jaunty and typically British.  It could easily be soundtrack of any other British show.  It seldom intrudes, which is nice, but it certainly doesn’t contribute. 

But let’s talk about what’s good with the show and how it channels Broadcast News.

It’s not until midway through the second episode that I start warming up to Bel, the heroine, and the POV of the show itself.  Bel tells off the oily political liaison to the BBC, Angus McCain (wonderfully played by the impeccably cast Julian Rhind-Tutt who memorably played the reporter in one of my favorite rom-coms, Notting Hill, peppering Hugh Grant about the flowers brought to the press party.)  She uses the phrase “Grab the wolf by the ears,” which Clarence, her boss, had provided her earlier in the day, to slam McCain with panache.  At that moment I finally had someone to root for, and to like.  I also got an inkling about what the show is about: the struggle for power.

After getting rebuffed, McCain tells Clarence that they allowed the young woman her promotion on the assumption she could be controlled. Broadcast News, besides having a great love triangle, was about the ambition of its characters.  This British version is more about the class of people and how their ambitions are rooted in their social standing, and all their ambitions seem to be about power (to which Egypt’s power grab of the Canal is, no doubt, meant to serve as a metaphor.) The Hours characters seem to want the power for the ability it will provide to pro bono publicum or pro bono in se I’m not sure.  Maybe it’s to provide a springboard out of the social standing ala Miss Doolittle.

So, whereas the William Hurt anchorman was a vapid, good natured, good looking shleb, the point of the movie was that his very refusal to understand what he was reading to us was the essence of evil.  He was all about how well he looked on camera, how well he presented what he was reading or how well he could manipulate us into liking him.  He was the story.  How he reacted to it.  What he thought about it (or what he pretended to care to think about it). His ambition was just the empty ambition of the empty headed: to prove you’re good enough, even though you know you’re not.

The Hour version of the lead anchor, Hector, is also not entirely worthy of his promotion.  His ascension comes from the politics  of class and culture.  Hector is born rich and privileged; seems to be connected to the right people, married well and appears to have also been approved by all the superiors (including the aforementioned McCain, who is simultaneously sinister and smarmy.)  Hector wants to prove he is as good as he knows he is.  He has a fatal flaw though, an attraction to his lovely producer, Bel, and he’s married. 

We meet her, the wife, in Episode Two, and get to know her in Episode Three.  As written (so far), she’s a one note character (with one heck of an estate.) She’s someone for Hector to rail against, but the actress, Oona Chaplin spoils the bland character set up for her and has such a presence in her brief appearances that I found myself wanting to see more of her.  Another missed opportunity. 

(Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity is yet another “minor” character, the terrifically named Lix Storm played by “Duckface” from the other great Hugh Grant rom-com, Four Weddings and a Funeral (thanx to Basketcase C Carol Adams for jogging my memory about where I’d seen her before.) We could have a whole ‘nother show on this, yet another, disposable character, and it would be better than anything the new Fall Season has premiered. Yet there she sits, in a corner, brilliantly saving the show she didn’t get promoted to run.  Was that the point?  I’ve got to stop pointing out these stumbles, I promised to discuss the positive.)

The Holly Hunter character and Bel seem roughly alike.  They don’t appear to have an agenda, they’re just self-assured and know they can do a good job.  Freddie and Albert Brooks are dissimilar in that Freddie is very much of the working class and seems to chafe at the notion of the entitlement of the Upper Class while the Albert Brooks character wanted the promotion more for the prestige and respect due him, and couldn’t see how hilariously unsuited for the job he was.

Episode Three carries us more into the personal lives of the characters as we meet the families up close and personal.  We see the estate.  We see them play games. Play kids, play.  And we know they’re acting like kids because they jump up and down on the beds, and play Hide and Seek, and the adult version of spin the bottle which is “let’s sneak a kiss in hallways to add tension”.

All this and the mystery portion deepens with one sinister character in particular living up to expectations, though in surprisingly dramatic way.

Before I see episodes four and five (which Time-Warner have finally made available On Demand, I’m going to read the Atlantic article, which already has me steamed based on the title alone.  Better than mad Men?  I think not.

*The words  I had to look up?

Rapprochement, propitiate, and abrogated.   And one of them ain’t even English!
‘rap-rosh-mahn’ is reconciliation,
propitiate means appeasement.
and abrogate means to officially abolish.