Whatever glints of promise that caught my eye last week vanished during Vexed's second hour, as its uninspired premise and unlikable leads rapidly overwhelmed an already tedious storyline. The characters and situations are too underwritten to be very dramatic, while the jokes are too obvious or feeble to be funny. This has quickly become the summer's biggest letdown for me, as an admirer of Howard Overman's work on Merlin and Misifts.This week, Jack (Toby Stephens) and Kate (Lucy Punch) were called to an idyllic rehab clinic to investigate a car bombing intended for a depressed banker. There followed an hour of limp shenanigans with the two mismatched detectives, poking fun at mental illness, and nothing about it worked for me. The police response to the threat of a killer stalking a rehab clinic was ludicrous from beginning to end. Why are only Jack and Kate on this case, sans uniformed backup, and having to guard the target's bedroom on nightly shifts themselves? Why isn't the banker put into protective custody, away from the scene? Why don't Jack and Kate at least interview all the patients and staff?
Crazily, a major breakthrough came courtesy of the café owner they're always visiting -- a black character who now has two "funny" strings to his bow: to continually feign outrage at Kate's accidental "racism" toward him, and to handily reveal he's a bomb expert who infiltrated the IRA because, well, someone has to push the plot along with some professional insights. Kate and Jack are so inept it's actually infuriating seeing them at work, no matter how jokily the script treated the seriousness of the threat here. It's a show that can't resist playing loud pop music over unfunny sight gags like Jack helping paramedics lift a fat dead patient onto a stretcher.
One key problem is that the balance of comedy and drama seesaws from one extreme to the other. There was a scene with Kate and her injured husband Dan (Rory Kinnear) receiving marriage guidance counseling that was performed with surprising rawness by both. In fact, there was such a lack of humour to the scene that it felt utterly misplaced. The tone just isn't right. And moments after you've been slapped by an incongruously somber moment that reduces Kate to tears, you soon find yourself watching a scene where juvenile Jack throws a rock into a nearby bush and -- wouldn't you know it! -- bonks someone on the head who was sat behind it. I think I've seen the same joke before, on Chucklevision.
Toby Stephens is putting the effort in, but Jack's not the hilariously unorthodox and womanizing rogue I think he's supposed to be. He's just a childish, smarmy idiot whose ennui with each week's case is more uncomfortable than amusing to watch. You have no faith that Jack's slacker attitude and outrageous behaviour (he hired a man with OCD to be his cleaner) will ultimately crack the case. He may have Columbo's taste in coats, but that's as far as his detective skills go. I barely trust the more responsible Kate, either, as she's too distracted by her deteriorating marriage and trying to keep her petulant partner under control.
Overall, episode 2 of Vexed was a failure in nearly every respect -- save for a few moments that inspired a thin chuckle, like Jack mistaking a plump window cleaner as an obsessive-compulsive patient with an eating disorder. This week's mystery didn't provide any nourishment for armchair sleuths, as the perpetrator's identity was obvious the moment the actor appeared (the faintly recognizable character actor whose appearance screamed "creepy killer"), and the simple pace of last week's storyline was absent. The story dragged, the jokes flopped, the leads aren't likable, the chemistry is non-existent, the premise isn't clever, the mystery was halfhearted, the culprit was obvious, and the drama was listless.
WRITER: Howard Overman
DIRECTOR: Matt Lipsey
GUEST CAST: Roger Griffiths, Rory Kinnear, Ronny Jhutti, Kevin Doyle, Amanda Douge, Robin Pearce, Jonathan Slinger, Richard Cant, Ashley Artus, Hannah Stokely & Dan Tetsell
TRANSMISSION: 22 August 2010 - BBC2/HD, 9PM
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