Tom Vaughan-Lawlor recently told The Irish Times that the overwhelming popularity of Love/Hate and Nidge, his drug-dealing bad-boy character, encouraged him to step away from Irish television.
You can understand his logic: the day after Nidge was gunned down in the finale, one tabloid splashed a picture of his character’s head at the centre of a tombstone, with the headline “RIP Nidge”. After Nidge’s bumping off, he was dead right to look elsewhere.
With his new series, These Sacred Vows (RTÉ One, 9.30pm), it all turns full circle for Vaughan-Lawlor. If he left RTÉ with Nidge in a pool of blood, he returns lying face down in an actual swimming pool in Tenerife. His resurrection of Irish TV has begun in death.
Sadly, it’s all downhill from there for this underwhelming Irish take on the “rich people are the worst” genre, as popularised by The White Lotus. This is a White Lotus with a green tinge – a featherweight cover version that lands like a sort of Trite Lotus (other words rhyming with white also come to mind).
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For those of us who were iffy on The White Lotus in the first place, it’s challenging viewing. But even for those who enjoyed seeing megabucks holidaymakers receive their comeuppance, it’s not great. Oh, for an original idea to blow through the corridors of Montrose.
Vaughan-Lawlor plays Fr Vincent, a priest who is in Tenerife to preside over the wedding of two ghastly south Dubliners, who, along with their families, are essentially depicted as escapees from a lesser Ross O’Carroll-Kelly novel. Everyone is minted, morally repugnant, drug-fuelled, oversexed, unfaithful and generally deplorable.
Their partying ends tragically and, as with The White Lotus, the story begins with a death (that of Fr Vincent). Then we rewind a week to the events leading up to his demise.
Vaughan-Lawlor heads a sprawling cast that includes India Mullen as a rare sympathetic fellow holidaymaker, Ava, alongside Justine Mitchell, Jason O’Mara, Adam John Richardson and Shane Daniel Byrne, all of whom play pampered D4 dunderheads.
But none of the caricatures lands. For one thing, they’re far too broad. Not everyone in real life is irredeemably awful – and this is even true of rich people. Also, the show is just the latest Irish drama that gets Irish men, in particular, completely wrong.
I was reminded of that terrible ad where the dad buys his daughter a bar of chocolate at the petrol station and self-immolates with macho smugness – or every single male character on every Irish scripted series from The Clinic onwards. They’ve all got this same puncheable, bestubbled, narcissistic quality that I’m not sure is a particularly accurate reflection of reality.
What this archetype misses is the “big eejit” quality of so many of us Irish men – the sense that we’ve somehow been pinged forward in time from our first Confirmation and must pretend to be responsible adults, while fearing that at any moment we’ll be unmasked as baffled man-babies. Sad to say, the closest television has ever got to capturing the essence of the Irish male remains Dougal McGuire on Father Ted.
One surprise is just how much of a weak link Vaughan-Lawlor proves. He has chosen to saddle Fr Vincent with what I imagine a certain sort of Dubliner would take for a country accent. But which part of the country, exactly? One minute he sounds like he’s from Kerry, then the Midlands, then Waterford.
Episode one ends with a twist that changes everything we’ve been given to understand about Fr Vincent – and which makes his actions up to that point even more baffling. It’s as if he were a different character all along, which doesn’t make sense, given the naivety he displays about all the drug-hoovering holidaymakers.
Unoriginal and illogical, These Sacred Vows is enough to make you swear off Irish television for good.
