Rain Dogs (Neon, from Wednesday)
Costello Jones is the textbook definition of a lovable rogue. When we first meet her at the start of the new BBC/HBO dark comedy Rain Dogs she’s being kicked out of her flat, along with her 10-year-old daughter, Iris, and a couple of bin bags of their stuff, just under £3000 short on the rent. “Thing is, bubs,” she explains philosophically, “If you live an interesting life people are always going to be chasing after you.”The series is created by Cash Carraway, and inspired by her own interesting life, which she detailed in the 2019 memoir Skint Estate: Life on the Poverty Line. That book saw her lauded as “the voice of her generation” and “the next Bukowski” by the chilled-out and understated UK press, and it won’t be a surprise if the same level of enthusiasm is extended to her first foray into television. But for all the praise as Carraway’s funny, spiky script deserves, Daisy May Cooper deserves an equally large bouquet for the way she brings it to life with the perfect mix of swagger and heart. Life on the poverty line means this is far from the first time she’s been booted out of her flat – “not again,” sighs the man at the laundromat when she dumps her bin bags and says she’ll pick them up tomorrow. Salvation this time comes from a man she has saved in her phone as “Selby – do not answer”. The private-school-educated Florian Selby (Jack Farthing) is a louche dandy in the underworld who’s just waltzed out of prison and back into Costello’s life. He spells nothing but trouble but he’s got Costello’s back – and importantly, three grand. So much happens in the first episode, so many memorable scenes, only to end up exactly where we started. This is a series that understands that that’s just life sometimes.
Desperate Measures (TVNZ+, from Monday)
Desperate times call for a dark and serious-looking British thriller miniseries that majorly pushes the limits of plausibility, and that’s exactly what we have in Desperate Measures. Amanda Abbingdon (Sherlock) plays Rowan – bank teller, single mum to a 15-year-old son, saddled with inherited debt. The desperate measures promised by the title come after her son gets caught up in a botched drug deal on the estate and ends up owing local gangsters quite a few thousand quid. Enter her career criminal ex (Luther’s Warren Brown), with whom she teams up to do the only thing you can do in times like these: rob a bank.
