Review: Sky Atlantic's Hit & Miss

Summary:

Although hard to categorise, this unusual new British drama starring Golden Globe winner Chloë Sevigny is a must-see.

Highlight:

The scene where Mia beat up an aggressive landlord should have been difficult to watch, but it was actually quite satisfying. It helped that he was about as likeable as the love child of a Nazi war criminal and the Go Compare tenor.

Lowlight

It has to be Chloë Sevigny's 'Irish' accent: a peculiar mixture of Father Ted, Bono and Mel Gibson in Braveheart.

Full Review

To say Hit & Miss is the best programme ever made about a transgender Irish assassin who used to be in a circus might sound like a faint praise. So ignore it, as it was very good indeed.

Although there's a chance it simply moved too quickly for us to notice how ridiculous the premise was, as the genre shifted more often than a broken gearbox. The episode opened with a shot of a hooded figure coldly

assassinating a running man. It felt slick and familiar, like a Hollywood film or possibly an expensive, late-stage episode of the Bill.

That's where the familiarity ended. A few minutes later, the hooded figure was revealed to be- firstly- a woman, Mia (the otherworldly Chloë Sevigny) and then very soon after that, a woman with...how to put this delicately...
A whatsit.

Meeting Mia

Showing Mia fully nude so early on was a bit of a risk, but it got it out of the way. It cleared the genitalia agenda, so to speak, in a move that seemed to say: here it is, have a good look. Got it? Good. Now let's move on.

What we moved onto was even more unexpected. Instead of watching more cold blooded murder punctuated with

shots of Mia working out in what looked like a car park, we were transported to a grimy Irish pub as she explained to her boss that she'd just received a letter from her cancer-stricken female ex who, crucially, had never mentioned that she had an 11 year old son by Mia. Until now.

By the way, that clanging noise you heard as she opened the envelope was the sound of incredibly clunky exposition.

Before we could say 'unexpected plot twist', Mia was knocking on the door of a rundown farmhouse in- judging by the mixture of accents- Donegalancashire, only to find herself confronted with a whole host of grief-stricken kids under the bad-tempered leadership of the eldest daughter.

Shameless

If that feels familiar, it's because the series was produced by Paul Abbott, creator of the hit Channel 4 drama Shameless. Hit & Miss has a similar feel: the streetwise children, the ramshackle living conditions, the absent parent (in this case, a dead mother) and a transgender guardian who happens to be the biological parent of one of the kids.

Ok, that last one is just Hit & Miss. But you get the point.

It's an unusual programme to say the least, and hard to describe without using phrases like 'well, it's a bit like Kick Ass meets Boys Don't Cry via Billy Elliot'.

Overall, it feels like a self-consciously edgy British Sundance Film Festival entry sliced up into television sized chunks. But one thing's for sure, you won't find a more original programme on the box at the moment.

Definitely more hit than miss.

Quotes
"If things didn't change, there wouldn't be any butterflies"

"Anything with a jaw can be knocked out."