Deep Water, episode 2 review: after a shaky start, this implausible drama shows no sign of improving
Deep Water (ITV) is proving to be a shallow puddle. This middlebrow thriller about the tangled lives of three women in Windermere, adapted from Paula Daly’s novels, saw dark secrets surfacing at the school gates. And not just about whose parents had helped with maths homework or panic-bought dress-up day costumes on Amazon.
This was a town where dinner parties ended in illicit bathroom sex (makes a change from After Eight mints) and skint physiotherapists solved their financial woes by sleeping with a patient for a whopping £5K fee. There’s a missing schoolgirl too – isn’t there in most TV dramas nowadays? – but she’s so spoilt and sulky, it’s hard to care.
The second episode didn’t improve matters much. Absent-minded Lisa (Anna Friel) tried to make amends for her role in the girl’s disappearance, while cracks appeared in the smugly perfect facade of worried Kate (Rosalind Eleazar). Masseuse Roz (Sinead Keenan) took the plunge and had sex for cash – before, even more preposterously, being offered £10K for a repeat performance.
Meanwhile, dogged DC Aspinall (Faye Marsay, too good an actress not to play a more pivotal role) and Kate’s git of a husband Guy (Alastair Mackenzie, who I still can’t help associating with his starring role in sleepy Sunday night McSoap Monarch of the Glen 20 years ago) both appeared to be hiding something dodgy.
The Lake District scenery was handsome and the three leads wholehearted but there was little else to commend this pulpy, implausible melodrama. Every male character was awful. Stilted dialogue sounded like it had been written by an alien trying to pass itself off as human. Even the surnames of the protagonists – Kallisto, Toovey and Riverty – were strangely unrealistic, as if generated by some sort of randomising algorithm.
Aiming to be a British Big Little Lies, it’s more like an inferior mountainous remake of Noughties drama Mistresses. Can I invest another four hours in this hokum? Only if you pay me £5K for the next episode, then keep doubling it.
