The brazenly ludicrous TV thriller has its place. Sometimes it’s fun to throw all logic and sense to the wind and surrender to a bananas plot whose twists and turns – which play out amid huge, aspirationally spotless homes and gorgeous vistas – are so entertaining and hilariously camp that you end up glued to the screen. Unfortunately, Playing Nice does not fit this mould. Yes, it’s a frantically tense drama, set in a beautiful location, that teems with preposterous coincidences and plot developments. But it is also a story about forcibly removing preschoolers from their parents and exposing them to potentially mortal danger at the hands of a disturbed sociopath. Which, you know, isn’t really my idea of a laugh.
Playing Nice – adapted by Grace Ofori-Attah (Malpractice) from the book by JP Delaney, whose novel The Girl Before was also turned into a disappointing BBC drama – does have a compelling moral conundrum at its core. The Rileys – restaurateur-chef Maddie (Niamh Algar), stay-at-home dad Pete (James Norton, slipping in and out of a strangely high-pitched Cornish accent) and their son Theo – are a picture of down-to-earth familial joy. Until, that is, the hospital phones to inform them that Theo isn’t their biological child: recent genetic testing on another boy suggests two premature babies got mixed up in a neonatal intensive care unit three years ago. Although this is incredibly unlikely in reality (and the show’s eventual explanation for the swap is nowhere near convincing enough), it taps into a primal fear: which new mother semi-delirious with exhaustion on the postnatal ward hasn’t fleetingly feared such a scenario? And the upshot – that two couples each feel a deep-seated connection towards both children – is a complex and fascinating ethical puzzle that a better drama might have dug into. But Playing Nice – if this wasn’t already abundantly clear – is a very bad drama.
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Rather than focusing on the actual swap, we almost immediately shift into a schlockier gear as Miles (James McArdle) – Theo’s birth father – comes a-knocking at Maddie and Pete’s door. It takes approximately three seconds for ear-piercing alarm bells to start ringing (how on earth did he get their address, for starters?). Not that the Rileys can hear them – instead, they pootle off to Miles’s enormous cliffside home, which he shares with David, the Rileys’ biological son, and his practically silent wife Lucy (Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay), who gave up a successful artistic career for motherhood. Everything about the visit – during which the couples agree they will keep their current children while spending time with their birth sons – is deeply sinister, from Miles’ insistence that Lucy not drink to the way a nanny whisks the boys away at the earliest opportunity. Miles is obviously a dangerous, controlling bully who wants Theo all to himself, and soon he is employing all manner of dirty tricks – many of them mind-bendingly ridiculous – to get him, as astoundingly gullible professionals follow his leads.
While the ensuing action is nightmarish for Pete and Maddie – as, of course, having the minutiae of your parenting weaponised against you would be – they don’t exactly do themselves any favours, especially when they leave a pot of cannabis gummies next to Theo on the kitchen table while he draws. One of the weirdest things about the series is how readily the Rileys accept the demands of Miles, despite the fact he is laying on the baddy stuff incredibly thickly; his red flags are practically Bond villain-esque. Pete – with his beanie and scraggy windswept aesthetic – is meant to be the beta nice guy in contrast to Miles’s alpha sociopathy, but he just comes across as spineless and stupid. For all his heinous flaws, I couldn’t help missing Norton’s Happy Valley monster Tommy Lee Royce, who would at least have had the wherewithal to play Miles at his own game.
The fact that Playing Nice is a farcical melodrama coiled around an inherently upsetting premise makes it an unpleasant yet hollow watch. Dread is baked into the subject matter; the prospect of children being removed from loving parents and at best manipulated, at worst abused, is nauseating. At the same time, it’s impossible to emotionally invest when everything else about the show is so infuriatingly ridiculous.
As the series builds to a guffaw-inducing finale, some questions are answered, others are left hanging, and the primary narrative is resolved in the most asinine way imaginable. Playing Nice is clearly unconcerned with interrogating real human emotions or examining what it actually means to be a parent. Instead, it’s the worst of modern television: a witless mystery overly reliant on insidious ambience and really nice houses.
• Playing Nice aired on ITV1 and is available on ITVX
