Clean Sweep, RTÉ’s new slow-burn psychological thriller, has a dirty little secret

After Sweden’s dreary march to Eurovision glory on Saturday night, some viewers will have had enough clean sweeps to last a lifetime. But here is a Clean Sweep of a different kind: a psychological thriller (RTÉ One, Sunday, 9.30pm) starring Charlene McKenna as an Irish homemaker with a secret past.

The Irish suburbs are a largely unexplored milieu, even though they are where most of us live. But while Clean Sweep is full of potential, this blend of slow-burn crime caper and family drama never coheres. Worse, the whole thing is gummed together with a lack of verisimilitude that requires ever greater leaps into suspension of disbelief.

McKenna is Shelly, an “average” Irish mother with such average problems as an annoying teenage son with a burgeoning weed habit. She also has a sleazy husband who, it is implied but never spelled out in the first episode, is having an affair with a colleague. Shelly has secrets of her own, however – and these come rushing back in the bloodiest fashion when a figure from her past tracks her down.

Shelly has been living in the burbs of Dublin commuterland (the series was filmed around Wicklow) under an assumed name. Alas, her carefully curated life threatens to unravel when a hairy Englishman jumps out from the soft-drinks aisle in a supermarket and says they have to talk.

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They share a murky history, so Shelly agrees to meet him at a local hotel. But when he threatens to destroy her new life she loses her temper and shoots him. In the real world, a gunshot in a hotel would cause a commotion. Shelly, though, passes it off as a popping champagne cork. Alas, her winning streak unravels when her husband, Jason (Barry Ward), who is a garda, reveals he has been tasked with solving the murder (the body having been eventually discovered).

[ Charlene McKenna: ‘I spent lockdown in an Irish Rugby fleece covered in paint and dust’ ]

Clean Sweep is written by Gary Tieche, an American with Irish roots. But though he has done his research, you never believe in Shelly or her life of school runs and spaghetti Bolognese for dinner. As is often the case with Irish dramas, one big stumbling point is its portrayal of male characters. Most Irish men are at least 40 per cent bumbling eejit – among some of us the proportion is higher yet – but Jason is yet another in a long Irish TV tradition of slimy smoothies with great patter and top-drawer stubble.

Talk about suspension of disbelief. It’s as if RTÉ, having created the philandering Dick Moran in Glenroe 45 years ago, decided its work was done and that every male character it ever put on screen should be Dick remixed. I’ve never met anyone like Jason in real life. And while I’m sure these sorts of people exist, he nonetheless feels a million times too slick for a garda in a small town. He’s a case study in gaslighting toxicity, not a person you can believe in.

In fact, all the male characters are unsympathetic to the point where it feels as if the show is trying to tell us something. There’s a new American dad (also sleazy). Shelly’s eldest, Derek (Rhys Mannion), is a drug-toking skateboarding annoyance who feels like an exile from a Junior B version of HBO’s Euphoria. And then there’s that English guy from her past life, who has found God but whose mullet is entirely the work of the devil.

There are smaller flubs, too. Someone talks enthusiastically about wanting to watch a replay of a Wicklow v Sligo football match, leading to you wonder if anyone involved has ever watched either Wicklow or Sligo at football. And Shelly’s daughter is named Caitlin – or, as the series insists we pronounce it, “Kate-lin”. Shudder.

RTÉ is making all six episodes of Clean Sweep immediately available online. Having slogged through the first one, I’m not sure I’m inclined to plunge further in. Clean Sweep’s dirty little secret is that it’s a bit of a drag.