All About [Killing] Eve

photo courtesy of spoilertv.com

LIGHT SPOILERS

     Killing Eve is one of the most stylish, most sensational TV shows released this year. Adapted from Luke Jennings’s Codename Villanelle series, Killing Eve was produced for television by writer/actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge and stars Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer. Oh plays Eve, an MI6 agent who crosses paths with a lethal, psychopathic assassin named Villanelle (Comer). As Eve learns more about her enemy, the two develop a competitive, obsessive, and potentially murderous relationship.

     On paper, Killing Eve has a lot in common with spy thrillers we’ve seen a million times over. We’ve become accustomed to sleek spycraft, intricate narratives, and shifting allegiances. We’ve also seen this character dynamic before: the protagonist and antagonist develop a twisted admiration for one another. So what makes Killing Eve any different?

photo courtesy of variety.com

     Killing Eve’s first and most conspicuous advantage is the quality of its writing, which demonstrates its wonderful breadth within the first few minutes. The writing team, led by Waller-Bridge, give the show a razor-sharp edge. Dialogue is consistently smart, funny, and naturalistic. When the show lands a character beat—even a fairly rote one—it finds clever ways to communicate all the necessary information and feeling without belaboring the point. There’s even some honest-to-goodness subtext!

     From a structural standpoint, the show benefits from a tightly paced, thoughtfully developed narrative. It never drags and it rarely feels rushed. The latter half of the season isn’t quite as strong as the middle, where the two women have their first series of encounters, but the narrative is confident and worthwhile throughout. That Killing Eve can manage this is impressive, especially when so many shows—even highly promising shows—end up either draping a thin plot over too many episodes (like most of those Marvel Netflix shows) or writing themselves into a hole halfway through the series (like LOST).

photo courtesy of amc.com

     It’s not an overstatement to say that the entire cast is exceptional. Fiona Shaw and Kim Bodnia, who play some of the more substantial parts, deserve particular notice. But the spotlight, of course, rests on Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer in the lead roles. As the main (sympathetic) character, Sandra Oh’s Eve is the center of the show. Quirky, tenacious, paradoxical, and genuinely exhausted, Oh’s Eve is someone you can root for. She’s outshined, however, by Jodie Comer’s Villanelle. Comer brings an astonishing and unpredictable energy to the performance. She’s manic like Andrew Scott’s Moriarty, sexy like Gina Torres’s Anna Espinosa, chilling like Kathy Bates’s Annie Wilkes. At the end of the day, these performances are the product of a total creative alignment—writers, actors, and directors who have spent the time to fully imagine (and then fully realize) the characters.

photo courtesy of digitalspy.com

     There are a host of other things I could keep going on about (the great music, the action, the ultra-stealthy sleuth stuff, etc), but for brevity’s sake, I’ll conclude with a word about Killing Eve’s women. Despite the show’s adoption of a typically male-dominated genre, Killing Eve has women in its very DNA. This is a world populated by women. And they’re not arbitrary, placeholder women. They’re real women. Women who are imagined and drawn like actual human beings: capable, funny, determined, occasionally deadly, impulsive, deeply flawed. There’s a lived-in quality to these characters; their experiences feel authentic and worth talking about. It is perhaps this ability—the ability to be purposeful and perceptive about depicting a range women’s experiences while working within this genre—that most contributes to Killing Eve’s extraordinary novelty.

      You can watch Killing Eve on BBC America's website or app for a limited time, but you'll have to sign in with your cable provider. It's scheduled to debut on Hulu later this year.

photo courtesy of nytimes.com