Netflix show feels like The Diplomat lite

Entertainment

With echoes of Emmy nominees like The Diplomat and Bodyguard, the latest Netflix U.K. import about the intersection of political crises and personal dilemmas sounds promising enough on paper, with the makings of a miniseries that could be gripping and gobbled up over a late-August weekend. But sadly, Hostage is the kind of show you’ll forget by Labor Day. 

The five-episode thriller centers on a meeting between the British Prime Minister and the French President in the shadow of growing crises, including a deadly pharmaceutical shortage that’s threatening to tear England apart. While she’s facing pressures to deal with a country that has increasingly less confidence in her, PM Abigail Dalton (Suranne Jones) is also raising her daughter Sylvie (Isobel Akuwudike) and caring for her father Max (James Cosmo). 

Her political opposite, the conservative French leader Vivienne Toussaint (Julie Delpy), has arrived in London for a summit about the drug shortage and what her country can do to stop it. One of the more interesting early elements of Hostage is that Toussaint and Dalton clearly don’t particularly like each other and not just on a political level, which allows creator Matt Charman to play with the differences between not just British and French leadership but the personalities and priorities of the countries. Sadly, it’s one of several avenues left largely unexplored in the three episodes screened for critics, as the writing is forced to eschew any serious sociopolitical commentary once the plot kicks in. Instead, almost every scene in the show involves characters saying exactly what they’re thinking and/or need to do to get what they want.

The real drama starts when Dalton’s husband, Dr. Alex Anderson (Ashley Thomas), is kidnapped in French Guiana. The kidnappers send the P.M. a video insisting that she must step down by a certain time or her partner will be executed. Given French control over the South American region, Toussaint is in a position to come to the rescue of her G7 frenemy, and she seems willing to do so until the kidnappers play with her political future too, blackmailing her into standing down. It leads to an amazing amount of dialogue like “a choice between this job and my family”—you know, the kind of thing that no one actually says.

And speaking of family, the way it’s used here feels like it edges on misogyny. It doesn’t seem an accident that both leaders are female, and so the choice to make their partners and children into Achilles’ heels for enemies to exploit almost comes off as a commentary. It’s no fault of the talented young actor who portrays her, but Sylvie, Abigail’s daughter, is a plot device in human clothes, a character designed purely to put maternal pressure on a protagonist in a way that feels pretty gross. And a scene in which Sylvie just happens to walk into a room to see something terrifying comes off like one of the more ridiculous dramatic TV choices of the year. Add the shallow Sylvie/Abigail dynamic to the fact that Vivienne’s decision-making becomes driven by a secret related to her stepson, and you have a show that too often feels like it’s playing into disgusting, prehistoric tropes about the flaws of female leadership.

If the writing was more consistently entertaining, it might be easier to excuse the arguable sexism of Hostage as accidental. But too many of the scenes play out with people who don’t act or speak like actual human beings, coming off like cogs in an over-oiled plot machine. The daughter is the most egregious example of this, a character who exists only to repeatedly say things like, “If you get my dad killed, I’ll never forgive you.” Where shows like The Diplomat take the time to truly humanize world leaders, this one is happy to keep them two-dimensional as often as possible in order to serve the plot. It’s a thriller that feels manufactured instead of driven by the behavior or relatable human beings, and it’s not even gripping enough for that to be forgivable on the level of a guilty pleasure.

Luckily, this isn’t the case all the time. There is one great scene in the second episode in which Jones and Delpy are allowed to shine as their characters go through the motions of a political PR moment about electronic vehicles as they discuss far more serious issues in a lower register. The always-good Delpy particularly excels at finding that strained smile for the cameras, the one that politicians master at a young age if they want to get the support of their people. (It also sells how much Toussaint knows that the real important stuff is happening away from the waves given to TV audiences.) This is a beat that doesn’t feel as overwritten, one driven by character and even political commentary more than just dull plotting.

Unfortunately, these moments are few and far between. Perhaps Chapman and his team will find a satisfying way to bring the personal and political drama of Vivienne Toussaint and Abigail Dalton together in the last two hours in a manner that makes the shallow nature of these three episodes feel like table-setting. It’s possible, but the cheap cliffhanger to end the third hour makes it seem even less likely that viewers are going to get a satisfying, meaty payoff. 

Hostage premieres August 21 on Netflix  



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