Everyone's a Critic Dept

So I finally got around to watching the first episode of NY-LON last night. I'm usually very reluctant to invest time in new British dramas, because I have a deep and abiding loathing of the kind of thing it invariably turns out to be. Either you see the same old act-ors or it's the same old writ-ers.

I risked NY-LON because it seemed like a very good idea for a series - and one guaranteed, surely, to garner international success.

To summarise, an American girl, New Yorker, is on a flying visit to London and she meets a bloke. She's quite nice, sort of like a brown skinned Natalie Wood; he's a bit of a twat, having spent too much time on his sideburns, and clearly having attended all the Handsome Lessons except the last one (the one in which they point out that everything you've learned so far is a waste of time because, in reality, everyone just gets lashed and climbs into bed with each other regardless of appearance).

Anyway, Sideburns turns out to be a bit of a nutter - first of all he gives Natalie W all his money (after having known her for, ooh, 5 minutes); then he gets into a fight in a bar and ends up in nick. She happens to see him there, because she's reporting the theft of all her money etc (first thing that happens) and instead of thinking, "Oooh, this bloke is clearly a bit of a nutter," she goes out with him and ends up back at his place.

As they wake up fully clothed, I think we're supposed to think it was a chaste evening of endless conversation and then crashing out. You know, like that scene with Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz in Vanilla Sky, except, unlike in Vanilla Sky we aren't privy to any of the conversation. Instead, we just get to see them waking up the next day, hear a snatched conversation with vague references to the night before and the fact that they told each other stuff about themselves, and she's off to catch her plane.

Only she leaves her earring behind, and Sideburns Nutter decides, instead of posting it to her, to take it to her personally. Riiiiiiighert. Because he sneaked a look into her PO to get her address while she was asleep.

Meanwhile she arrives back in NY to find her flat-sitter (who needs a flat sitter for a couple of days? We don't know), her ex-boyfriend's brother, lying dead from smack or something.

Sideburns Nutter Stalker arrives in NY and leaves her earring on her steps (insetad of in her mailbox). She freaks out, as you would, but still ends up going round to his hotel later for a shag.

End of episode one. So we've established that she's poor (works in a record store and teaches night classes to poor people) but righteous; whereas he is a stockbroker (therefore highly paid with no job security - his best friend, the geezer from Teachers, gets the sack for no apparent reason early on). She has an ex boyfriend who looks like Ryan Adams and is, hey!, in a band and everything; and a flatmate who looks like she doesn't wash her hair.

Good things about it:

• Great premise


• Filming partly on the Lower East Side with the idea that all New Yorkers aren't impossibly living in lovely loft apartments
  
• ...er...

Bad things about it:

• Forgetting that not all Londoners are impossibly rich, and living in half-decorated loft apartments


• They introduced all the complications of ex boyfriends/ pregnant ex-girlfriends, child-care for feckless relative issues etc., without really showing us any of the inner life of the characters


• One of the best things about meeting someone new and falling in love is that first night where you stay up or walk about talking about stuff - that's what we want to see in a drama like this. But they just glossed over it. We don't get the Tom/Penelope scene - which is the only reason to see Vanilla Sky, because Cameron Crowe nailed it - we get nothing. They give us nothing. In other words, the script is dire, lazy, sketchy, half-written.

Instead they try to let the cities do the talking, with lots of skyline shots and gimmicky time-line tricks, and people walking around like they're in music videos on MTV, which is yawn-a-liscious, and lazy, and crap.

To summarise again: great idea, lousy script.

And the nutter with the sideburns, I don't know. People like him make me want to puke. They're 10-a-penny wannabee Colin Firths, and desperately dull to watch. Why the geezer from Teachers wasn't the main protagonist, I don't know.