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!! POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD !!
Inside Man is a new show on Netflix staring David Tennant and Stanley Tucci. It came highly recommended by two different people and decided to give it a shot. It's only four hour-long episodes so I was able to watch the entire show in one night.
The show revolves around Stanley Tucci's character Grieff and David Tennant's character Harry. Grieff is a convicted murderer sentenced to death in the United States for the murder of his wife. He was a criminology professor and from behind bars he helps people solve mysteries and murders. Tennant's character Harry is a Vicar in England who, through a serious of unfortunate events and bad decisions, becomes embroiled in the kidnapping and attempted murder of his son's maths tutor Janice Fife. The two characters become connected when a crime journalist who befriends Janice after Janice helps defend her from a predator on a train, interviews Grieff about his mystery-solving side-hustle.
I'm leaving many of the details of the story out in this short review, but the gist of the story is that Harry the Vicar and his wife Mary make bad decision after bad decision until they feel there is no way out but to commit the ultimate crime: murder. Though this was billed as a mini-series, this was one of those instances where I felt that if this story was greenlit in the past, if would have been a two hour movie. However, in the age of streaming, studios are instead pumping out these types of mini-series. What I find is that this often results in poor pacing and extended 'character building' that could have been done more skillfully and effectively within the constraints of film.
As a result of this strange pacing, I found myself losing interest in some of those 'filler' moments. The urgency of the story was not reflected in the urgency of the show itself. For example, at one point the Vicar sets a timer for one hour, essentially marking the amount of time the protagonists have to solve the mystery and save Janice, but that hour feels almost twice that long in actual run time. The show wants us to feel the crime journalist's desperation to solve the mystery of her missing friend, but instead has her spend most of the show sitting around waiting for riddles and tidbits of information from Grieff. I would have rather preferred her possess more agency in the crime-solving process and take more initiative. Instead, while she is in the US, she just drives wherever Grieff instructs her to solve another random side-mystery while Grieff secretly solves the mystery of the journalist's missing friend. And when the journalist returns to England, she's driven around by Grieff's associate, another criminal, and told what to do and where to be the entire time.
Though the pacing was lacklustre, The performances by the actors were great. Everyone brought dimension to characters who, in my opinion, lacked much dimension themselves. It felt like every decision the characters made, especially Harry and Mary, was done more so to hammer-home the theme of the story rather than decisions normal people would make. Even the Janice character, a somewhat socially awkward woman with a very brash and blunt personality, does and says things that seem completely out of left field. The entire avalanche of bad decisions starts with Janice acting completely irrationally and escalating a bad situation into a catastrophe in the blink of an eye. There was no rhyme of reason for her actions, but the Vicar's response to Janice's irrationality was even more insane. No one in the entire Janice-Mary-Harry trio acted in a way that made any sense from the jump.
The thing is, I think that's what the show was trying to show. Grieff mentions repeatedly that 'we're all murderers', and that one bad day can reveal the inner murderer in anyone. But I felt like the story was trying too hard to make us believe that, and as a result I just didn't. The 'bad day' turned into I think 2 or 3 days, and 'cooler heads' never prevailed. It was just the Mary and Harry repeatedly eating shit and trying to 'fix' the situation by eating more shit.
I know I've mostly just complained about this show, but it's only because I felt like it could have been so much better than it was. There's a nugget of a good idea in there, but it's buried under layers of fluff and distractions. This is just one example of something I've noticed for a couple of years now with the rise of mini-series, especially on streamers like Netflix. Sometimes, the best was to tell a story is to cut the fat and make it a movie.