“One of us is crying/ One of us is lying/ In her lonely bed/ Staring at the ceiling/ Wishing she was somewhere else instead…” Poor Juliet Stevenson must have wondered how she’d ended up like the girl in the Abba song – waiting for a call from her agent to apologise for getting her into this mess. It’s not Juliet’s fault. It’s the silly script.
One of Us began last week on a dark and stormy night when a paranoid schizophrenic off his meds (but on recreational drugs) butchered a pair of newly-weds before car-jacking a Lexus and driving to a lonely Scottish glen where both sets of in-laws lived. Unfortunately he crashed before he could wipe them all out so, having rescued him from the wreckage and only then discovering what he’d done, the bereaved locked him in a dog cage. Yet this didn’t stop someone slitting his throat.
It would be funny if we weren’t meant to take this nonsense seriously
This tale of two tribes, the House of Elliot and the House of Douglas, never comes to its senses. Stupidity is piled upon stupidity: having decided to lie to the police – headed by a drug-dealing detective (Laura Fraser) with a dying daughter – the naughty neighbours reject burning the body in case the smoke is spotted by the besieging paparazzi. Instead they bury the body and the stolen car with the aid of a bulldozer – in broad daylight (pictured below). Do they not have news-choppers north of the border?
Again, Jamie (Christian Ortega), the weird Douglas son who once took a gun to school to scare someone, is supposed not to hear the Elliot daughter driving home in the dark from work (where she tends a dying woman) because he’s listening to music through earphones. How can he not notice her blazing headlights? This might seem pernickety but it is symptomatic of a drama in which more care is devoted to close-ups of barbed wire than to the words.
The fourth death is a long time in coming, and belongs to someone only introduced a minute before. There’s zero opportunity for the viewer to empathise. A schoolgirl takes one of the detective’s tabs of LSD and drops out – of a high-rise window. It would be funny if we weren’t meant to take this nonsense seriously.
So what else actually happened in this second episode? Adrian Edmondson (the father absent from the Elliot household) confesses to his new wife that he has a family in Scotland – and that one of his sons has been slain. Juliet Stevenson, his ex-partner, finds a bloody, rusty knife. It’s not enough.
Writers Jack and Harry Williams are in danger of proving to be one-trick ponies. Whereas The Missing brilliantly drip-fed information against a French backdrop of increasing tension, watching One of Us is like trying to do a jigsaw depicting Scotch mist. As the happy couple discovered in the opening moments: life’s too short.