Worth: $18.00
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Cast:
James Corden, Sally Hawkins, Melia Kreiling, Colin Morgan, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Samuel Anderson
Intro:
... you’ll be hooked from the first scenes.
It’s a good thing that all 6 episodes of Prime Original series Mammals will streams on its premier date of November 11, because you’ll be hooked from the first scenes.
We join a blissfully in love couple on an idyllic country holiday. Their aliveness is infectious, as they drive through stunning countryside and literally leap in the hot tub at their picture book destination. All too soon, a tragedy cuts through their rapture, shocking secrets are hunted out and revealed, and we are left spinning on the slipstream of lives unravelling.
Like a more benign Ricky Gervais, James Corden can play the everyman, eminently likeable with superb comic timing and emotional candour that’s irresistible. Here, he is perfectly believable as chef Jamie Buckingham. Corden is joined by the always excellent Sally Hawkins as his sister Lue and her partner Jeff, played by Colin Morgan. They’re a couple with a slow burn mystery that forms an intriguing counterpoint to the main drama. Both actors bring a fantastic sense of inner worlds bubbling under the surface of homespun country style living, with the payoff for the audience that those other dimensions are brought to the surface in ways you couldn’t imagine.
That main drama is Jamie’s relationship with the French siren Armadine – a terrific performance by Melia Kreiling, who makes all of her character’s unfettered behaviour totally credible. They meet in a Cinderella-in-reverse situation with struggling chef Jamie catering on a rich playboy’s yacht, though the series kicks off some years into their marriage, before looping back to fill in the origin of their unlikely match.
The series tag line poses the question: can we stay true to the promises we strive to keep when, after all, aren’t we all just mammals?
That great mammal, the whale, is a particular totem for Armadine, including a running reference to Moby Dick. She seeks the magic while Jamie clings to the prosaic view that whale sightings are simply signs that the creature has to come up for air. Each character is seen through the lens of the human struggle to be monogamous, with Armadine an outlier in her search for authenticity.
The script by Jez Butterworth (Edge of Tomorrow, Spectre, Ford Vs Ferrari and series Britannia, which he wrote with Mammals showrunner/creator James Richardson) and direction by Stephanie Laing (Veep) are smart, well-paced and serve the performances beautifully. London and Cambridge Street scenes are a visual feast, and the restaurant theme is fun and an excellent device for winding up the dramatic tension as it piles on to the beleaguered Jamie. Later in the series, Gordon Kennedy plays a great cameo as Jamie’s archetypal bullying chef, while episode one sees a cameo from Tom Jones.
Some scenes in a therapist office are a little obvious, as is an academic lecture by the enigmatic Jeff on mammal behaviour, but the editing wisely places these contextual pieces at the latter end of the series when we are already invested in the terrific character journeys.
As to the conclusion, best leave that to the individual viewer, whether they feel resolved or misled. Either way, you won’t be able to resist the ride.
