TV Review: The first thing you noticed about Angels In America was its size. It landed in the schedules with a hefty thud. Three and a quarter hours on Saturday night; three and a half hours on Sunday night. Watching this would require more than time.
It would require concentration, resolve, and regular stretching of the legs. It would require a very comfortable chair. It was like sitting down to a fat novel at breakfast, planning to be dabbing the corners of your mouth with the last page by supper.
When this was shown recently on America's HBO, it played in two solid three-hour blocks, unspoilt by commercials, on back-to-back weekends. Channel 4 allowed us toilet breaks, at least, but by running it on successive nights it was giving it little chance. How many could commit to that? Life is short. The weekend is shorter and more valuable.
Faced with inevitable indigestion, it is no wonder most chose the junk food, the delicious grease of I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!, which was on at the same time. But it is such a shame. Tony Kushner's adaptation of his play about lives in the darkening shadow of AIDS in Reagan's America fulfilled its promise to be one of the crowning glories of television drama.
Kushner's story follows Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), who develops AIDS and is then left by his boyfriend, Louis Ironson (Ben Shenkman). As the sickness worsens, he is visited by an angel (played with bull-in-a-china-shop vigour by Emma Thompson) who tells him he is to be a prophet, chosen by a heaven that's been abandoned by God.
Louis begins a relationship with a repressed Mormon Republican lawyer, Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson), whose wife, Harper (Mary-Louise Parker), is having a nervous breakdown accompanied by Valium-fuelled hallucinations. Joe's matter-of-fact mother (Meryl Streep) sells her Utah house to come and sort out the mess.
Joe's boss is Roy Cohn (Al Pacino playing a fictionalised version of the McCarthyite lawyer), who is also dying of AIDS but is unwilling to acknowledge it because only the powerless get AIDS. He is accompanied to his death by the ghost of executed spy Ethel Rosenberg (Streep, again), whom he helped to convict. At the crossroads of several of these lives is the sweet, wise nurse, Belize (the outstanding Jeffrey Wright).
Kushner's script had hardly an ounce of flab on it. It retained the work's intrinsic theatricality, with scenes largely consisting of two-handers, moving to a compelling rhythm of confrontation. Leave the room and you would miss a lot. Check the time and you'd drop a stitch.
Under Mike Nichols's exquisite direction, Angels In America revelled in the wide-open spaces of television: the camera suddenly turning away from a scene to soar out the window and across the city, or being sucked through the roof into the sky. The fantasia was simultaneously breathtaking yet restrained.
There was much to savour in Harper's gentle hallucinations and Prior's early dreams, especially when the two met in a recreation of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, unsure as to who is intruding in whose hallucination. But likewise in the elegant violence of Prior's increasingly apocalyptic visions, most notably when his apartment was shaken apart, the ceiling cleaved open to make way for the angel, at the conclusion of the first half.
Meanwhile, the 1980s were recalled not as kitsch but in the sense of plague, of dangerous blood and dark lesions appearing in society, politics, religion, sexuality and relationships.
The physicality of Pacino's performance was staggering, his Cohn a snake locked in a rheumatic coil, before melting away to disease and morphine. In this portrayal, Cohn was irremediable but complex, layered under many shades of black. More understated but just as powerful was Mary-Louise Parker, who maintained a fractured cuteness, a mind and body frazzled from journeys between realities.
Among the Wizard of Oz references was a cast playing multiple roles. Streep's included an ageing rabbi in the opening scenes - now that's versatility. Thompson played a nurse and a street psychotic as well as the abrasive, tuneless angel with eight vaginas - no, that's versatility. Actually, her performances marked the weak spot. There was little subtlety in her angel's lack of subtlety.
Gradually the piece gave way to fantasia, and ultimately to Prior's tepid speech to the congress of angels about humanity's need for love and life.
Yet, for the most part, Angels In America carried both the central stories and the ambitious fantasy with equal ease. It rewarded commitment. It might be the television drama event of the year. It is what the DVD was invented for.
All the way through The Big Bow Wow, characters kept referring to the titular nightclub. Have you been to the Bow Wow? Apparently, the Bow Wow is good. Everyone was talking about the Bow Wow. And then the action moved there - and it seemed to have all the atmosphere of a parish fête. So this is the Bow Wow. What's on next door?
The Dublin of this new drama is an impersonal place, all straight lines and box trees. From above, it looks like a planner's model; from the ground, it looks like a showroom. It is pallid in continuous twilight.
The characters, too, are all straight lines and artificiality. In this belated Irish version of This Life, we are following a group of twentysomethings living in the Docklands area. It features self-obsession against an exaggerated tableau of violence, sex, drugs, work and parties. There has never been anything quite like this on Irish television before, yet it feels oddly familiar.
The characters come pre-packaged, with the whiff of polystyrene and their labels still attached. There is a gay man, a heartless bitch, a computer nerd, an ethnic character.
They cannot snip the tag. The gay man's employee continually calls him "faggot"; the Irish Arab's flatmate indulges in repetitive casual racism. Each works the jobs of modern Dublin: computers, bank, construction, record store, noodle bar. There is the continual scratch of boxes being ticked.
They are narcissistic, shallow and humourless. The trick will be in knowing when it is deliberate and when it is down to an inarticulate script. They communicate in script-speak, under a pen indulging in caricature. When a drug-dealing schoolboy is approached on a daytime DART, he reels off the narcotics like they're today's specials. A middle-aged man asks for "a coffee" and is met with mild disdain by the waitress. "Americano, latte or espresso," she asks wearily. In something so new, that's a barb that went blunt long ago.
It is heavy on the style. The camera watches from the middle distance, from behind glass and windowpanes. There is no warmth at all, which may reflect this fictional city and its inhabitants, but the viewer needs some invitation to come in from the cold. This week's was the first episode and it may have spark, but there remains the question of whether The Big Bow Wow will ignite in such a vacuum.
It was followed by the third series of 24, in which our hero must stop a virus wiping out Los Angeles. Pay attention, because I will explain this only once. It is three years since Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) of the Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) saved Los Angeles from nuclear destruction.
He has a nice office and a helpful secretary, but he talks at her as if she's standing on his toe. This, it turns out, is because he is going through cold turkey after becoming a junkie to ensnare drug overlord Ramon Salazar, whose brother is threatening to unleash a plague unless he is released. You know, the usual stuff.
Jack is accompanied by an eager young partner. He'll die. Or he's a bad guy. Or he'll save Jack's life. Or kill him. The guessing starts here. His name is Chase, which is apt given that he's running around with Jack's daughter, Kim. She spent two series running from baddies, but has pulled up a seat at the CTU. She was a babysitter last time we met her; now she's a computer hotshot for a government agency. Nothing about that girl has ever made sense.
Elsewhere, agents in love Tony Almeida and Michelle Dressler are married and having a crisis because he's being transferred to another job. Unless she walks into the room with explosives strapped to her wedding band, ignore this storyline. Although, you should rule nothing out.