Year of the Rabbit: Season 1

London, 1887. Detective Inspector Rabbit is a hard-drinking copper who hates playing by the rules. However, his rowdy behaviour and the odd tendency of his heart to stop beating at inopportune moments encourages his boss to assign him a new partner, the young, posh and unstoppably chipper Strauss. He is also joined (initially unofficially) by Mabel, who harbours ambitions to become the first female police officer ("fopper...lady-filth?") in London. The trio tackle a series of serious crimes, unaware that they are involved in a much more serious and large-scale operation which may imperil all of the East End.

2019 may not be the technical Year of the Rabbit, but it may be the Year of the Berry. Matt Berry has been a British comic institution for well over a decade, due to his memorable appearances on everything from Gareth Marenghi's Darkplace to The IT Crowd to Toast of London. This year that has stepped up a notch with his appearance on the What We Do in the Shadows TV spin-off, which has brought his madcap comic genius and impeccable vocal gesticulations to a wider international audience, as well as this new sitcom for Channel 4.

Year of the Rabbit is a period comedy with decent production values, recreating the streets of Victorian London with impressive skill. The cast is also exceptional. As well as Berry as Rabbit, up-and-comers Freddie Fox and Susan Wokoma play Strauss and Mabel with gusto and conviction. Elsewhere, more veteran hands can be found in the form of Alun Armstrong as Rabbit's long-suffering boss, Paul Kaye as his arch-rival detective Tanner, Keeley Hawes as recurring semi-villain Lydia, Ann Mitchell as tough innkeeper Gwen and Sally Phillips as a Princess of Bulgaria (with a truly outrageous accent). There's also blink-and-you'll-miss them camoes from Berry's new Shadows bosses Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi.

The behind-the-camera firepower is also impressive. Andy Riley and Kevin Cecil are veteran comic writers who've had a hand in The Armstrong and Miller Show, Black Books and HBO's Veep, and are more than capable of delivering great comic lines.

It's therefore a shame that Year of the Rabbit doesn't quite live up to its billing. There are usually several good laughs per episode, but there's also a lot of jokes that don't really land. There's also a curious overreliance on swearing. Swearing can be funny when deployed judiciously, especially combined with some great use of Cockney slang (one of the show's better gags is that whenever a new piece of technology is introduced - the telephone, electric street lights - a group of Cockneys must gather to decide on the appropriate slang term), but in Rabbit it often feels like it's trotted out whenever the writers run out of ideas, which is a dismaying several times per episode. There's also a couple of running gags that don't really work, especially an odd one about Rabbit's eyebrow that I thought was a setup for some kind of grand revelation, but nope, at least not in this season.

The season does generally improve after the opener, which can best be described as mildly diverting rather than required viewing. The series also goes quite a long way on Berry's rich voice booming out ridiculous declarations, albeit this time in Cockney. Hawes's superb ice-cold villainy is also excellent, and the show does get a lot of mileage out of the horrendous conditions of the time, slipping through a surprising amount of period detail in the gags, such as characters pondering if they've been struck by love when in fact they're sniffing in mercury fumes from a poorly-ventilated shoe factory.

Ultimately, the first season of Year of the Rabbit (***) feels a bit undercooked. The premise is excellent, the acting talent is certainly there, but the writing needs to be tighter with less reliance on the old stand-bys of swearing and tired running gags. There's enough solid jokes to make viewing worthwhile, but it's not, at this stage, essential viewing.

UK to air AGENTS OF SHIELD soon after USA

Channel 4 (and 4 HD) in the UK will be broadcasting Joss Whedon's new show, Agents of SHIELD, within a few days of American transmission. The exact day of the week is still being worked out, but the show launches on Tuesday 24 September on ABC in the USA.

This is quite a coup for Channel 4, although it remains to be seen if they can translate the massive success of The Avengers at the box office to good ratings for its TV spin-off show.

Les Revenants (The Returned): Season 1

In a small mountain town in a remote part of France, the dead start returning. Camille, a 15-year-old schoolgirl killed in a coach accident, returns home to find her twin sister is now four years older and her parents are separated. Simon, a musician who cannot remember how he died ten years ago, returns to discover his fiancee and daughter are living with another man. Serge is a serial killer, himself murdered, but now alive again and eager to resume his crimes. One of Serge's would-be victims, traumatised for years by the incident, finds a little boy who is also one of the returned, and must look after him whilst her own life falls apart. None of the returned know why or how they have come back...but it is merely the first sign that something much bigger and more dangerous is happening.

The Returned (Les Revenants in its original French) is a gripping, slow-burning drama series which is based around a simple premise: what if the dead come back to life? Not as zombies or ghosts, but living, breathing human beings with no memory of what happened to them and no explanation available for how this has happened? The reactions of families, loved ones and friends is mixed and varied: some treat the returned as horrific freaks, others try to adjust to the reality of the situation and others (including a local, canny religious leader) see it as a sign from God. The returned themselves are bemused and confused by the situation, but - in a possible clue to what's happening - all seem motivated by unfinished business from their former lives.

At the same time, the show develops other mysteries. The water level at the local dam is dropping, to the alarm of its staff. A previous dam on the same site collapsed in 1977, flooding a neighbouring village and killing more than a hundred people. Does this have something to do with what's going on? And how is the water reappearing in random locations in the area, such as at the local power station?

The Returned is keen on giving out the mysteries, but not on providing grand, over-arcing answers to everything (with at least three seasons planned and only airing at two-year intervals, we may be in for a wait for some answers). Instead, the show prefers to pose a question and then develops it over the course of several episodes. We get answers, but these may be complicated by other factors, or lead to fresh questions. Sometimes a single flashback or a line of dialogue may suddenly connect several elements together and lead to moments of revelation. The series is small in scale for its first half or so, but then becomes more epic in later episodes when contact with the outside world is cut off by a power failure. This late development kicks the series into a higher gear and introduces an extremely tangible sense of threat and menace to proceedings that carries the show through to a powerful cliffhanger ending.

The series is extremely character-focused, and both the writing and acting is superb throughout. The show has a strong focus on younger characters, such as Camille and her twin sister Lena (and the idea of twins separated and aged differently is an extremely powerful and disturbing one, handled well), and the actresses (Yara Pilartz and Jenna Thiam respectively) absolutely sell the idea of them being siblings and caught up in extraordinary events. 'Victor', the young boy adopted by the traumatised nurse Julie, seems to be at the heart of many of the mysteries in the series and is played with at times disturbing intensity by Swann Nambotin, whose thousand-mile stare makes the skin crawl. Flashbacks to his life before show a completely different, more emotional and 'normal' boy, and Nambotin's ability to switch between the two modes is phenomenal. Céline Sallette is also extraordinary as the damaged Julie, a character in denial about how badly her near-murder has destroyed her life until her encounter with Victor allows her to rediscover her humanity. Put like that, it sounds trite, but Sallette's performance (and that of Alix Poisson as Julie's former lover, Laure, desperately trying to reconnect with her) powerfully sells it.

The rest of the cast is also excellent, with the series' ability to use the big mysteries to illuminate the more human character moments being inspired. In this regard, as well as others, there's a little bit of Lost in the show's DNA, though the show is a bit keener in giving out answers to questions in the first few episodes. However, the show does occasionally resort to the same cheap tricks Lost used: characters sometimes completely fail to communicate with one another and will almost deliberately refuse to ask the questions any sane human being would in that circumstance in the name of tension. I can also see a question of who gets to control the town's supply of firearms might become a big question in the second season (as it was in the second season of Lost, somewhat tiresomely).


Still, the show benefits from sharper writing and better acting than its American forebear and the mysteries are different enough to raise more interesting themes and questions. The tone of the show is also very different, being darker and far more tense: David Lynch and Twin Peaks feel like more of an influence in that regard. The cinematography is also stunning, with the beautiful scenery offset by a decision to film daylight scenes only around dusk, resulting in a desaturated colour palette that adds to the creepy atmosphere. Backing everything up superbly is the haunting minimalist soundtrack by Glaswegian post-rockers Mogwai, which complements the visuals perfectly.


Season 1 of The Returned (****½) will be released on an English-subbed DVD in the UK on 9 September. Unfortunately, despite being shot and shown in HD, no English-language Blu-Ray release is currently listed. The DVD is also not for sale in the United States, though that might change after release. Season 2 will be shown in France in late 2014.