This article is a preview from the Summer 2019 edition of New Humanist
There’s an oft-repeated truism about the entertainment business: something doesn’t work until it does. For decades, Disney avoided making films with two lead female characters, because the challenge of animating their expressions while also keeping them looking pretty was deemed too great. Then Frozen, a film about two sisters who receive a lot of screen time separately and together, became the top-grossing animated film of all time and earned over a billion dollars at the box office worldwide.
Similarly, the accepted idea was that horror films wouldn’t attract audiences if they were also funny. Until Jordan Peele made Get Out, that is – a film that somehow combines horror, comedy, blaxploitation and conspiracy into a single creation. It won an Oscar and made money hand over fist as word of how good the film was spread like wildfire.
The same applies to TV. Executives and commissioners have long been reluctant to put money behind women-dominated, action-based stories, believing that they just won’t bring in the viewers (partly because it was assumed that men wouldn’t want to watch them). Except now there’s Killing Eve, a genre-defying female-led juggernaut of a show, which proved the conventional wisdom wrong by becoming both an award-winning critical smash and a surefire ratings winner. It premiered in April 2018, and had already been commissioned for a third series before the second one had aired.
Yet it’s difficult to describe exactly what Killing Eve is. It’s certainly at least partly a thriller, centred around the characters of Eve Polastri (played by Sandra Oh, who won a Golden Globe for her performance in the first series) and Villanelle (portrayed by the up-and-coming British actress Jodie Comer). Eve works a boring desk job at MI6, but she’s privately obsessed with the idea of the female assassin, who can kill undetected partly because nobody will associate the hard edge required to murder to order with the softer stereotypes of traditional femininity. Villanelle is just such an assassin: she’s equally capable of using a hairpin to stab a man as firing an AK47, and she’ll do it all while wearing an enormous pink ballgown if she feels like it.
So far, so easy. But there’s a strong espionage plot, too – perhaps unsurprising given Eve’s employer. Villanelle is originally from Russia, and the first series spent some time in Moscow as Eve discovered the deep background to this murderous prodigy and how it connects to larger geopolitical tensions. In some episodes, though, I could have sworn that Killing Eve was in fact an unlikely and unconventional romcom, because although Eve is pursuing Villanelle for her crimes, they also seem to enjoy romancing each other, with fancy gifts and homecooked meals.
The show is further complicated by its dark sense of humour. It doesn’t serve up the grim kind of gags you might have seen in a show like Spooks or 24, though – it wants you to guffaw, and then feel a bit guilty because of what you just laughed at. For instance, there’s a moment in the second series when Villanelle, wearing one of her trademark ultra-feminine silk outfits and huge statement earrings, is sitting alone at a pavement cafe. A young woman approaches and says: “Wow, you look amazing, can I take a picture of you for my Instagram?”
“No, of course not,” Villanelle shoots back savagely. “Get a real life!”
It’s funny because it’s also nasty, and because it reminds us of the fascinating juxtaposition between the soft exterior drapery and the hard woman inside it, who can change her face and her accent at will so that she can strike people dead. It’s so rare to see such a complicated female character on screen, who has no man that she need be defined in relation to, and who is given the space to be unpleasant and beguiling and funny and everything in between. It’s even rarer to see two such figures in the same show.
Perhaps the mystery of Killing Eve’s addictive yet uncategorisable nature lies in its unusual origin story. Although the BBC was quick to trumpet its success, boasting of millions of viewers and great reviews, the show was actually commissioned by BBC America, which is a US cable channel and part of the BBC’s commercial division, BBC Studios. The channel is a joint venture between the American entertainment giant AMC and BBC Studios, and exists to supplement the licence-fee-funded public broadcasting part of the BBC that is headquartered in London.
Killing Eve therefore had a rather more American beginning than one might assume – the production company that made it, Sid Gentle Films, acquired the rights to a series of novels about the Villanelle character by author Luke Jennings, and hired the British Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge to adapt it. BBC America then picked it up as an original commission and it premiered in the US a full five months before UK viewers got to see it, because BBC One and BBC Three had to buy the rights to broadcast just like any other international distributor would (in the same way that streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon pick up the international rights to publicly funded BBC shows like Bodyguard).
In many ways, Killing Eve feels like a show that the main BBC should have made, not least because of the way it pushes boundaries by centering women. Except the BBC today is operating more defensively and conservatively than it has in decades, owing to a mixture of increasing competition from the likes of Netflix and Amazon as well as budgetary pressures from the new licence fee settlement overseen by George Osborne when he was the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer.
This will see the BBC forced to take over the responsibility for funding free TV licences for the over-75s when the current government budget for it runs out in 2020, and means that the BBC will either have to make cuts to its spending elsewhere or risk the bad PR of cancelling this pensioner freebie. Spending huge amounts of money on a show like Killing Eve, with its “risky” double female lead format and multiple international shooting locations, was never really on the cards.
That kind of caution comes at a cost. The average age of a BBC One viewer is now over 60 and Ofcom, the BBC’s regulator, has highlighted the serious problem that the BBC has with younger viewers. With alternatives like Netflix and Apple Music on offer, people under 30 have far less need of the BBC than their parents’ generation did, and it’s not exactly like the BBC has done a huge amount to persuade them to stick around.
At the same time, streaming platforms have a better idea than ever what people actually want to watch, thanks to all the data they can gather about viewers’ habits and preferences. If you’ve ever felt that a particular Netflix show so perfectly suited your taste and particular brand of nostalgia that it could have been designed for you, then you weren’t wrong. It was.
Making all TV just by analysing what we choose to click on when we’re hungover would be a total disaster, but I don’t think it’s an accident that some of Netflix’s biggest hits of recent times are shows that appeal to a younger audience’s progressive instincts. Reboots like Queer Eye and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina certainly fit this trend, as do series as disparate as teen romance To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and raunchy comedy Sex Education.
Whether it’s in format, casting or plot, all these shows contain a rare yet needed change to the status quo, either by casting actors of colour and women in lead roles, throwing off prudish stereotypes or changing the conversation about identity. And there’s a ripple effect – once Killing Eve or any other show with a previously off-limits premise has proved to be a success, there will be plenty of imitators following suit. That’s all to the good, although exactly how you recreate a character like Villanelle is a complete mystery to me.
Caroline Crampton is the author of "The Way to the Sea: Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary" (Granta, June 2019)
