What's wrong? Everything except the hair. The hair's the only thing that's better now than ten years ago.
That, and the way they all seem to have grown spines in the meantime as well.
NOTE: I was not even going to do write up this critique on This Life + 10. Annoying and irritating though it was, it seemed to fade into obscurity straight after airing, and I for one did not want to do anything to upset that natural death. However, that was before I discovered that it's coming out on dvd (and please, please note that the price has already been reduced, even though it's not yet been released).
***WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS*** (but trust me, there is nothing left to spoil)
All I ever want from drama is to be either surprised or given insight. The original This Life, while not as great as its posthumous reputation, offered moderate helpings of both. Although the characters were never that likeable, their lives, conversations and choices were realistic as well as interesting. The show was an accurate portrayal of life in the mid-nineties, seen through the eyes of people you wanted to know more about, and the storylines were cliché-free. You never knew where the writers were going, and I liked that.
In fairness to the writers, you certainly don't know where they're going in This Life + 10 either. But this stems from shoddy writing, rather than inspired twists and turns. To start off with, you keep telling yourself, trust the writers, they know what they're doing. And early on, it looks like that trust is going to be rewarded when Miles' Vietnamese wife Me-Linh turns out to be a semi-interesting character who starts a huge row involving Anna, Egg and Milly.
Me-Linh is the perfect expository device, and just what the show needs to tell us where everyone is at, ten years later. She is close enough to one of the main characters to be able to wreak real damage and show up genuine deep-seated conflicts and desires. For inexplicable reasons, however, the writers decide to get rid of her immediately after this scene, and the expository role is left to Clare, the documentary film maker. This is when it becomes abundantly clear that the writers have not a clue what they are doing.
Clare is not close to any of the characters, not even physically proximal. She lives in a trailer outside the house and continuously repeats that "I don't get involved". Nor is she a very good documentary film maker; she asks none of the interesting questions and starts no interesting rows, only some superficial (and predictable) fighting between Miles and Egg for her erotic attention.
As a result, the show stays firmly on the surface of their personalities and relations, which would still be fine, were the surface as interesting as in the original series. Sadly, however, it is not. It's some of the worst cliché-ridden drivel I've observed in recent memory.
1. I actually believed that, in spite of her early departure, Miles' wife and he had a sparky relationship - she was feisty enough, and the chemistry was there. But no, apparently theirs was a loveless marriage, based on national stereotypes (she wanted a white foreigner for status, he an Oriental sex kitten. This story has been told more often than boys have had wanks over Anna).
2. Self-help guru Warren is not actually happy himself! He's an addict. Who'd have fucking guessed. But look! In the end he throws away all his pills in one go, which is of course an extremely realistic course of rehab, rather than just a nice big gesture scene.
3. High-achieving single career woman Anna and stay-at-home mum Milly both feel something is missing from their lives and can learn a valuable lesson from one another.
4. Miles' moneyed success isn't all that it seems. He's bankrupt!
5. But guess what: money doesn't buy you happiness, realises a Birkenstocked Miles as he sets off to go b a c k p a c k i n g . Only the most predictable course of action for any protagonist since the Odyssey.
Where he got the funds to do that is anybody's guess, although I shouldn't really complain about such petty problems in a show that needs to convince us that Egg, the same Egg we see uttering the highly original thought that the war in Iraq is "about oil", is an insightful writer and a deep thinker.
One last thing. 30-somethings dancing to The Killers. Why? First Cameron Diaz in The Holiday, now Egg. Although if this will help convince people that they are boring wankers, it's fine by me.
In the end, the show is successful in its portrayal of 30-somethings only in the most roundabout way: by falling for cliché in the choice of plot, dialogue and music, it shows us that its once dead-on writers are now as out of it as the characters they're trying to portray. I will not even allow for the possibility that this is a conscious effort on the writers' part to show that the characters have become parodies of themselves. The clichés are not just in the character portrayal, but pervade through the structure of the narrative, down to the scenes, like the idiotic "flushing-all-the-pills-down-the-toilet" travesty.
On top of everything, the whole dead Ferdy and suicidal Warren thing brings in a nasty element of the tragic gay that I have too much of a bad taste in my mouth to bear deconstructing further. That's it. Now go away and be horrible somewhere else. And stop singing along to the Manics, it makes me want to bring back capital punishment.
