The jury’s out on the new BBC thriller The Living and The Dead
|||BY DEBASHINE THANGEVELO
WHEN it comes to comedy and crime drama, the British are in their element. And they always deliver praiseworthy and often critically-acclaimed offerings.
However, when it comes to the supernatural genre, they don’t often get it right, which explains why it isn’t a theme often explored. That said, I watched The Living and the Dead with an open mind. As a horror buff of TV series and film, I can speak with some degree of authority on what makes the cut.
Set in Somerset 1894, the costumes, casting and backdrop are most impressive. However, in tackling different stories in every episode, it somehow reduces the clout of the storytelling.The story features Nathan Appleby (Colin Morgan), a leading Victorian psychologist, who returns to his family estate in Somerset with his second wife, Charlotte, who has left behind a successful career as a photographer.
While settling in and trying to turn the farm's fortunes around by introducing modern agricultural tools, much to the resentment of the workers who are made to feel redundant, Nathan encounters some eerie happenings. Amid trying to get to the bottom of some of them, he is also dealing with his own demons of the past, especially when it comes to his dead son.
Creator Ashley Pharoah offers: “Many of his troubled patients come to him as a result of that Victorian obsession with death and the afterlife, damaged by mesmerism, mediums, ouija boards. Nathan is a man of science who believes that everything has a rational explanation. Charlotte is his vivacious, independent wife. Something of a leading society photographer in London. When they inherit the run-down farm of Shepzoy House, none of their friends expect them to actually go and live there.”
The first episode involved the possessed daughter of Reverend Denning. And the idyllic countryside setting is quickly tainted by a menacing presence and fear. Pharoah reveals: “Story by story, episode by episode, Nathan’s belief in science is undermined and finally shattered. As the summer moves through harvest to autumn and then winter, the stories get darker and nastier, until the entire community is involved and threatened. Charlotte’s response is simple: even if there are ghosts, our responsibility is to our marriage and our workers. But Nathan is not built that way. His obsessive need to understand, to explain, drives him deeper into the jaws of the afterlife.”
Over time, Nathan’s loving and kind personality switches to dark and desperate. And with Charlotte pregnant, it takes a toll on their marriage. The haunting tales include a child on the farm haunted by the ghosts of mining boys who died a generation ago and a demonic visitation from Civil War ghosts. There’s also an outbreak of black beetles that threaten the wheat harvest.
Amid all of this, Nathan has also started to see and hear strange things and these ghostly apparitions threaten to drive him insane. What baffles about The Living and the Dead is the birth of this evil and the hauntings. Perhaps it'll be revealed later on. Bottom line, with shows like The American Horror Story, Supernatural, Scream Queens, Bates Motel and Outcast ruling the roost, this new arrival on the TV schedule, sadly, only piques curiosity more than it lives up to expectations.
The Living and the Dead airs on BBC First (DStv channel 119) on Wednesdays at 8pm.