The Effects of Lying, ITVX, review: a promising father-led tale stuck in a dramedy no man's land
Have you found your way around ITVX yet? The streaming service has more than 15,000 hours of programming and new content is added every week, but I wonder how much of it is being discovered. It can feel as if shows are dumped there with little fanfare when nobody at HQ thinks they’re good enough for the main channel.
On the other hand, it’s potentially a good thing for fledgling programme-makers as it offers a home to shows that aren’t mass-market crowd-pleasers. Which brings us to The Effects of Lying.
It is an oddity, billed as “hilarious and heartwarming” but in reality is absolutely neither of these things. Nor is it a “comedy-drama” as advertised, because there are no jokes in it. Instead, it’s a rather sad story featuring marital unhappiness and, in one unexpectedly awful scene, a suicide.
The makings of a decent drama can just be discerned. Ace Bhatti is Naveen, a hopelessly unassertive chap whose wife (Laila Rouass) is cheating on him and whose eye-rolling teenage daughter (Lauren Patel) has an eating disorder. Father and daughter are unexpectedly at home to catch Rouass in flagrante with her fancy man, which involves her dressing up as a sexy policewoman. Even after this humiliation, Naveen just shrugs. “We are happy… enough,” he tells his daughter. “People expect too much.”
The drama unfolds over the course of one day and you can see what writer James Hey was striving for: an escalating series of events pushing Naveen to do something extraordinary and for his family – which includes Naveen’s good-for-nothing brother (Navin Chowdhry) and elderly father (Bhasker Patel) - to learn some Big Lessons about life.
But there are two ways to do this - either ramp things up to the level of frenetic comedy, or make it serious. This is fatally caught between the two and ends up being neither. The tone just isn’t right, which is a shame because Bhatti gives a thoughtful performance; it represents a British-Asian family very naturally and also does an unusual thing by making it the dad who runs the household, emotionally supports a troubled daughter and deals with the stress of caring for an ageing parent – in every other drama on TV, this is a woman’s lot.
