Chattanooga Times Free Press

‘Landscapers’ finds art in true-crime

BY KEVIN MCDONOUGH Contact Kevin McDonough at kevin .tvguy@gmail.com.

The popularity of true-crime docuseries has resulted in a kind of sameness to their presentation. And don’t get me started on those based on podcasts.

While the Hulu series “Only Murders in the Building” has lampooned the genre, the new miniseries “Landscapers” (9 p.m., HBO, TV-MA) rather artfully blows it up, telling and retelling a true-crime saga from any number of angles, and in strangely inventive and often comic ways, changing film stocks and perspectives — all to keep the audience off-kilter as it explores characters who are at once uniquely strange and maddeningly banal.

When first seen, Susan and Christopher Edwards (Olivia Colman and David Thewlis) are a British couple living in France. It soon emerges that they’re in a kind of self-imposed exile that has become a nightmare. Desperate for money, Christopher applies for various jobs, but his high school French makes the interviews nearly comical. Despite dwindling funds, Susan can’t stop building up her collection of movie memorabilia. She’s retreated to a fantasy world of silver screen glamour, and Christopher appears to be enabling her.

It’s not giving too much away to reveal that they are hiding from the reality that awaits them back home, a tale that involves buried bodies, stolen funds, allegations of abuse and a conspiracy and coverup a decade in the making.

Each episode of “Landscapers” takes a different tone. Sometimes Susan retreats into a Hollywood Western. In other moments, a police investigation unfolds like some avant-garde play, with interrogations shifting from jail cells to barely dressed stages. Sometimes the police are comic, at other times hard-boiled. At times Susan is reclusive, at others, a torrent of revelations. Christopher finds about a hundred ways to call her “fragile.”

Those who simply want the facts of an open-and-shut case may find this a bit of a dramatic exercise. And for those viewers, there’s always the ID network.

From “Peep Show” to “The Crown,” Colman has always straddled the line between the tragic and the ridiculous. Her smile often explores that territory between joy and madness. Thewlis, who was chilling as a mobster in a recent season of “Fargo,” is also a master of playing the perfectly forgettable face with more than a whiff of menace.

“Landscapers” is based on real-life crimes from 1998 known as the Nottinghamshire Murders. Despite a mountain of evidence against them, the Edwardses have always maintained their innocence.

› Acorn streams “Under the Vines,” a Kiwi comedy with a shamelessly familiar formula. A spoiled, oversexed Sydney woman of a certain age (Rebecca Gibney) and a London lawyer (Charles Edwards, “Downton Abbey,” “The Crown”) in the midst of several midlife crises, find themselves summoned to New Zealand to discover that they have inherited joint ownership of a picturesque vineyard. Cue the complications, cranky employees and colorful neighbors, and you have the makings of a familiar comedy. Acorn will stream two episodes of “Vines” every Monday through Jan. 3.

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2021-12-06T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-06T08:00:00.0000000Z

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