The intimidating glut of prestige shows rushed to air before the end of the Emmys eligibility period makes it harder than ever to know how one should portion out viewing time. Recent weeks have seen new projects from big names like Park Chan-Wook with stars such as Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas and Julianne Moore while the remaining days see actors like André Holland and Benedict Cumberbatch premiere dramas alongside the return of awards magnet Hacks.
There’s an inevitable impossibility for the average viewer, and voter, trying to schedule it all in and so certain shows will, and must, be sacrificed. The Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s globe-trotting spy drama The Veil is the perfect lamb for the job, a bafflingly bad time-waster that can be easily excised and promptly forgotten. It’s a hodgepodge of shows we’ve seen before – a bit of Killing Eve, a touch of Homeland – but it’s mostly reminiscent of a junky Netflix action movie only stretched over six episodes and with a laughably straight face. Perhaps if it had been told in less than two hours with more light-footed action to distract us, it might not have been such a slog.
One can see why an actor like Elisabeth Moss would find it an appealing prospect on paper, allowing her the opportunity to do something she’s never done before, a far freer and frothier role away from the relentless cycle of torture that is The Handmaid’s Tale. Even outside of the show, she’s kept herself in the wringer in punishing films like The Invisible Man, Shirley and Her Smell and shows like Top of the Lake and Shining Girls. One hopes she had more fun than we did here, a deserved break from the murk. Because as undercover MI6 agent Imogen Salter, she’s glumly unconvincing, a fault of Knight’s thin, dated Strong Female Lead characterisation (“Fuck the past, I need a martini!”) but also of an even more jarring affliction, a clanging British accent that she spends the majority of her energy wrestling with. It’s a hugely uncomfortable effort for her and for us and as wonderful as Moss so often is, this feels like a rare misstep.
Her character is forced into an unusual partnership with a suspected IS terrorist (the far more effective Yumna Marwan), who could either be predator or prey. Their dynamic, which twists and turns on a journey from Istanbul to Paris to London, is entirely juiceless, the idea of these two women trying to figure the other one out more compelling than what we’re lumped with, their banter often sounding closest to that of Knight’s worst film work, the Anne Hathaway stinkers Locked Down and Serenity. They bond over their shared love of Shakespeare (!) allowing for some clumsily inserted quotes and both hint at gradually revealed backstories, neither of which prove all that interesting.
Knight is insistent that we be absolutely astonished by his radical, rulebook-ravaging heroine – smoking, drinking, shagging and quipping her way across the world – in a way that feels so embarrassingly forced (as well as being a decade or two too late), we can never see past how he’s telling us to think about her to see her as a real or even interesting person. Every time she says something irreverent or does something unconventional, it’s never quite as sly or as surprising as Knight seems to believe it is, a character with an “obsession with annihilation” who’s awfully hard to get obsessed with. The show too is never as sleek or as smart as it wants to be, slowly, boringly unfolding with a creak, like a Gal Gadot action movie that thinks it’s a John Le Carre novel.
The Veil might just be a limited series, in more ways than one, but Imogen is clearly being positioned as a character who can be transplanted into new situations with new missions for her to take on, a pick up and drop game piece to be reused for endless seasons to come. But there’s nothing here that deserves expansion in a series that is already at breaking point. We’re led through the at times punishingly dull, four-and-a half-hour runtime with the promise of surprise but it never really comes. The only real shock is why, at a time of far too much TV, anyone would waste their time watching this.
