Undone by the Undoing?

One of the pleasures the HBO series The Undoing has given me is reading the negative reviews it has received. 

Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman in The Undoing

Lucy Mangan talked about it as “a lesson in the value of low expectations”, which she regards as entirely in keeping with our times, since “if 2020 has taught us nothing else, it is surely that things never turn out as well as you’d hope”. No startling twist at the end, you see, so that “what had been enjoyably slick became silly. What had been sombre became cheesy. Tension dissolved into disbelief.”

Well, perhaps. Except that surely the aim of a twist is to shock us, to take us somewhere we didn’t think we were going. In a gloriously meta way, denying us a twist where we were expecting one, sounds like a twist in itself. 

Besides, as Mangan has the decency to admit, there actually is a twist. It’s just that it isn’t in the investigation of the crime, as such things usually are, it’s in the testimony given in court. But that didn’t satisfy her either:

… what I suspect was meant to be the real and/or unexpected twist, involving a rogue witness, failed even to deliver on its own, already unsatisfactory terms. It wasn’t clear how it was engineered – the viewer was left to guess and infer too much about method and motive to believe in it.

Again, well, maybe. I understand that someone who wanted a chocolate dessert might be disappointed to be served chocolate sauce on the side. But it was still delivered, as was what we might call the side-twist in the series. So, you had to do some guessing and inference to work out how it was done? Well, I thought viewing that actually challenged you to reflect a little yourself was rather better than the other kind. Or have we gone back to the days when viewers needed everything served up to them with a bow on top?

Interestingly, Mangan does give the show credit for one of its aspects, if slightly sarcastically, pointing out that at least “it was a six-hour do, not eight or 12 or 24”. A similar backhanded compliment was paid to the show by Arwa Mahdawi:

Perhaps the best part of the Undoing, however, was its length. The six-part limited miniseries was long enough for you to get invested in it; short enough not to get tedious. 2020 feels like it is dragging on and on – giving me a new appreciation for TV shows that know how to swiftly wrap things up.

That was the conclusion of her review, with its reference to the nature of 2020 neatly picking up the title, ‘The Undoing was the perfect pandemic TV’ – again, hardly glowing praise. Still, taking it at face value, there is indeed much to be said for brevity – I’ve sat through far too many shows that take eight or ten episodes to tell us enough story to fill two or three.

What’s more, Mahdawi apparently lives in New York, and it was amusing to read her comment, “it’s weird to feel homesick for the city that you live in, but seeing New York in all its pre-pandemic glory did exactly that.”

She also mentioned another fault in the show which amused me:

You also spent half the time wondering why everyone’s accent kept changing; Nicole Kidman, in particular, seemed to forget she was playing an American.

Even more striking was the actor playing the District Attorney, Sofie Gråbøl (the surname, I once learned from an interview she gave, apparently rhymes with ‘Trouble’). Now, you can probably tell from the spelling of her name, that her roots are not in a nation that speaks English as a native language. In fact, you may remember her in the original version of The Killing, where she displayed impressive command of Danish. Which, as it happens, is her mother tongue.

Now, during my single visit to Denmark, it struck me that English actually is a native language to the country. But the second native language. It’s spoken with extraordinary fluency by huge numbers of people (at least in Copenhagen). There’s a local accent, but so there is in Yorkshire, Kentucky or Queensland.

Queensland, incidentally, is strange, because Australians insist on pronouncing it Queens-Land. Which is odd, because they talk about England, not Eng-Land. Just as they don’t talk of New Zea-Land.

Funnily enough, Kidman was brought up in the country that mispronounces Queensland and, though she plays many American roles and has lived in the US for many years, I suppose the Australian tones might sometimes re-emerge. I didn’t notice them, but I can imagine that the more sensitive ear of a New York resident like Mahdawi would pick them up.

As for Gråbøl, her command of English was superb. I wish I could be as proficient in a foreign language. But certainly there were moments when, even to my insensitive ear, she sounded nothing like a District Attorney from New York.

Still, none of that stopped me enjoying the series. Perhaps it is just good Covid entertainment, as the reviewers seem to suggest, much enhanced by its brevity. But, hey, what’s wrong with that?