Life: What the Must Watch reviewers think
Every week, the Must Watch podcasters review the biggest TV and streaming shows.
This week, Scott Bryan and Hayley Campbell share their thoughts on Life on BBC One. Alison Steadman, Adrian Lester, Peter Davidson and Victoria Hamilton star in the Doctor Foster spin-off. The series follows the residents of a large house divided into four flats in Manchester.
Have you been watching it? What did you think? Leave your comments below...
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(Credit: BBC/Drama Republic/Gary Moyes)
Scott says: "It managed to hit a depth that surprised me"
"The first 45 minutes of this is what I’d refer to as being BBC-ish. All of the actors are acting in a BBC drama like way - that huggy, Auntie, feel and vibe around it. It manages to be a bit sort of samey in that the characters blend into each other, at least to begin with.
"Then it managed to hit a depth that surprised me. So in Doctor Foster for example, it would start with a normal situation about a character’s break up and then it would get deeper and more intense - with a low level anxiety that keeps you watching.
"With Life, it does this really smart thing with Gail (Alison Steadman’s) character who thinks she’s in a happy, loving relationship with her husband Henry (Peter Davidson). Then she’s told by an old friend (who she mysteriously nearly runs over in the first few minutes) that she might have been in a controlling relationship. That’s as in terms of her husband always making her feel small, belittling her and limiting opportunities. Overall, she doesn’t realise she’s the victim. I’ve never really seen this issue depicted so well on screen.
"After brushing this drama off for so long, I then actually got quite hooked towards the end. The problem is it took too long to get there."
Hayley says: "You feel like you’re sitting in your grandparents’ house"
"It feels like a well-presented prestige soap opera. The idea is all of these people are experiencing life’s themes all one building ie. life, death, love, birth. The writer, Mike Bartlett, said in the Radio Times that he pinched the title from the Attenborough documentaries because in the same way, he saw that by looking at the intimate lives of individual creatures, we learn something large about the species. He’s deliberately exploring something epic through the tiniest detail. That’s what he set out to do — and that’s what he is doing — I just didn’t exactly find it thrilling. When you watch it you feel like you’re sitting in your grandparents’ house and they’ve chosen what’s on the TV. It didn’t have that shifting quality that great, intimate drama has.
"It also made me feel a little bit ill, because everyone is living in the same block and everyone’s always popping into other people’s flats without warning and that’s literally my nightmare scenario.
(BBC/Drama Republic/Gary Moyes)
Catch up on Life on the BBC iplayer.
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