TV: Babylon

Babylon is the latest programme written by Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, set in the world of the London Metropolitan Police force.  It’s a comedy-drama (or ‘dramedy’ if you want to sound ridiculous) and it’s directed by Danny Boyle.  

High expectations then.  Armstrong and Bain have written at least two of the most popular comedies over the last 10 years or so with Peep Show and Fresh Meat, and were involved with The Thick Of It.  Danny Boyle was involved with some kind of show at the Olympics or something.  This is a show that has been made by people with impressive CVs - so is it any good?

James Nesbitt as the Chief Commissioner

Well, I liked Babylon a lot.  I thought it managed to show four different sides to the police force in its opening ten minutes and introduce its characters very quickly.  By the first ad break you’ve already seen the normal front-line constables, armed response units, the communication office and the top brass.  It’s a lot to take in but it doesn’t really leave you behind because it’s so funny.  And it really does start out with a bit of an all-out comedy offensive (a man’s reaction to armed police breaking his door down eventually leads to him being tasered in the balls.  It’s much funnier scripted and acted by professionals, but I still think ‘tasered in the balls’ is a pretty funny sentence in its own right).  It seems like it’s going to be funny all the way through its 75 minute runtime but that isn’t what happens.

Just to make it clear, that’s not because it’s failed; it’s not funny all the way through is because that’s not what it’s aiming for.  There's the sense of wanting to do more than just get laughs.  In tone I found it very similar to the last series of The Thick Of It, which became more of a political drama with funny dialogue than a sitcom.  Some people thought that the fourth series of The Thick Of It was a bit of a failure too, and I guess that’s where you just have to draw a line and say it’s a matter of taste.

It's really, really lazy to say that comedy-drama (no, not 'dramedy') always falls short of being funny enough to be a good comedy and dramatic enough to be a good drama.  Most comment threads online about Babylon have at least one person making this smartarse observation without actually backing it up with anything from the show.  I think the truth is more that the show cracked it as a character-based comedy but that the drama was unfocused.

Babylon seems to be a natural progression for Armstrong and Bain’s writing, certainly if we take Fresh Meat as the example of their last TV series together.  Fresh Meat has 6 main characters divided into 3 general types –  the roughly realistic (Josie and Kingsley); mild exaggerations of stereotypes (Howard and Oregon); and extreme exaggerations of stereotypes (Vod and JP).  Basically, the normal ones, the social satire ones and the out and out clowns.  The last series of Fresh Meat started to focus more and more on characterisation, especially the more OTT characters like Vod and JP.  

What Babylon does is a more complex evololution of this; 4 different parts of the police force are represented with their own range of Fresh Meat-style character types, and it really works.  So you get Robbie being the Vod of the constables, all violent Id.  His funniest moment is possibly when he has to stop short of punching a protestor when he sees he’s being filmed, and settles instead for a threat of “I will verbally dominate you!”;  The sleazy Finn in Communications comes over like JP – an arrogant alpha-male wannabe; and so on.

The real evolution in the writing however is the move to not just to write a sitcom about the police.  It is a comedy-drama, but definitely weighted more in favour of drama.  The main characters are James Nesbitt’s Chief Commissioner and Brit Marling’s Chief of Communications and their characters have nothing of the sitcom about them at all.  The plot, about a lone gunman on the loose in London has nothing sitcom-y about it.  The laughs are there, but they’re ultimately more disposable than the drama...

The drama isn’t as good as the comedy though, and that’s where the structure falls down.  It’s not terrible, but the fact is the comic bits are more enjoyable than the dramatic bits.  And of course, the very fact that you can separate ‘comedy bits’ and ‘dramatic bits’ so easily shows that the joins are not seamless.  Some of the dramatic notes are hit well.  The scene where the gunman only starts being taken truly seriously by the police is when one of their own becomes a casualty is well played.  The subsequent scene where Nesbitt’s character goes to break the news to her widower is very powerful.  

Brit Murphy as Liz, new Head of Communications

But some of the internal politics stuff seems relatively tame (the ‘dirt’ that has been dug on Brit Marling’s character turns out to be that she was headhunted for a lot of money, which seems like it would be a surprise to no-one).  And the attempt at a bit of a romance thing with her character and Nesbitt’s is jarring because it seems to go against what we’ve seen of the characters.  What Babylon would benefit from (and could easily do) is some of the workplace scheming seen in shows like House Of Cards or Borgen.  What we see here is much less sophisticated or as involving.

What I really liked about the drama in Babylon however was that nobody was in complete control of any given situation, which seemed honest.  At the end there wasn’t a Malcolm Tucker character commanding everything, but just a room full of people shotuing “What’s happening?!?”  The point being made was that it doesn’t matter how far up the chain you are, no one can tame the million-headed Hydra of Twitter.  When the operations room cheers because the gunman has been shot, Liz doesn’t share their glee - she knows that the fact he tweeted ‘Please Don’t Kill Me’ shortly before his death is going to make everyone look like heartless bastards rightly or wrongly.  The comedy side of Babylon is all about the characters but the drama part is all about technology’s impact on society, right down peoples’ first instinct in any situation is to film it on their smartphone.  

While that is an interesting concept for a drama, Babylon's pilot is definitely best enjoyed as a character ensemble piece.  It had a point to make about social media and communication technology in the police, but ultimately it didn’t seem too clear what that point was.  Perhaps in the series it will be developed further; I really hope so, because this pilot made a series look very promising indeed…