Flack is a new drama about PR, except not really. It’s also a show about Me Too and the changing gender dynamics in society, except, you know, not really. It’s technically about the hidden push and pull between truth and entertainment and the dark arts of perception management, except one seemingly using a script that's been written entirely in emoji.
Our heroine is Robyn, played by Anna Paquin. Robyn is an American flack at a London PR firm. She's tough, no-nonsense, married to her job and possesses a heady bouquet of personal issues. We know this as the show opens with her in a hotel room giving CPR to the gay lover of a famous Premier League footballer who has overdosed on cocaine, before hoovering up the rest of the drugs herself.
Robyn is in the crisis-management business, which suits her particular set of skills. While other publicists dispose of the evidence, Robyn ingests it. It turns out she's not so much in crisis management as crisis inhalation.
Yet, don’t call them "crisis" when Robyn is around. Early on, an intern dares use the word and Robyn quickly corrects her. “We call them challenges,” she says as they stride through her office. So she’s in... challenge management?
The plot of the opening episode revolves around a family-man TV chef called Anthony Henderson. Henderson is beloved by millions of fans up and down the country but holds a dark secret: he’s slept with almost half of them. With a kiss-and-tell looming, Robyn is dispatched.
“You’re the best we have,” she’s told by her boss. “Plus, you’re the only one in the office he hasn’t slept with.”
This, dear reader, does not last long. I think it’s fair to say it was at the point some moments later – the two of them going at it like the clappers in a hotel bathroom – that I began to suspect we do not have another Sopranos on our hands.
Robyn meets the chef in a bar to work on a devious plan involving sending the chef’s wife for a mammogram in order to scoop up the sympathy coverage and bury the affair story. All well and good.
So how exactly do they end up in the hotel room together, you ask? Well, the chef gets a bit upset with the plan and so Robyn does what any self-respecting publicist with a randy client who can’t keep his pecker in his pants would do: she books them both into a hotel and cracks open the minibar to "calm him down". Crisis averted!
To begin with, Robyn gives him both barrels. He may, she says, have slept with all the 2,579 other people in her office (I’m paraphrasing here), but she will not be number 2,580. She refuses to be another notch on a bedpost that I can only imagine has been whittled down to a chopstick at this point. She then gives a dressing-down on his male privilege.
"You haven’t been told since you’re eleven that every male you encounter has the potential to rape and murder you," she begins, "followed by a life of pre-sexualisation, cat-calling and slut-shaming that fills you with so much guilt and fear that when you’re 16 and some kid starts choking you during sex, either with hands or his penis because he saw that in a bunch of porn, you assume that it must be you who got it wrong. So every time there’s an inappropriate comment or a hand on your thigh, you swallow it. Until one day the world says, hey, actually, all that crap isn’t your fault.”
It’s a great speech, one with both zing and feeling, but one slightly undermined by her asking him seconds later, “Why haven’t you tried to sleep with me?”
In some ways, the script is quite bold, in that it dispenses with character development entirely. Instead, everyone simply explains exactly who they are, which is handy if you’ve recently suffered severe frontal lobe trauma.
Robyn’s snide, privileged assistant, for instance – a passive-aggressive Post-it note in human form – insults a new intern’s outfit, before adding of interns, “We all had to do it. Well, I didn’t, because daddy plays golf with lots of important people.”
Thanks for that – there was almost a second there I had to deduce it from character, dialogue, nuance or acting.
The intern, meanwhile, is shown as being out of place in this glamorous, cutthroat world of PR because she a) has a haircut I’m almost certain was achieved by cutting around a mixing bowl and b) she’s dressed like Mrs Brown from Mrs Brown’s Boys.
In fact, the first episode of Flack had so many improbable moments I almost started liking it.
I particularly enjoyed the moment when Robyn – on a mission to calm down the chef's wife after she learns about the latest affair – breaks into her house in order to get the calming started.
“Where did you come from?” the wife asks, but more with a touch more casualness that one would expect of someone addressing a home invader.
“The bathroom window!” says Robyn brightly.
And that’s it, as if she’d said that the butler showed her in.
Oh, and during this chat, for no reason I could fathom, Robyn offers to destroy her own client, which I’m fairly sure isn’t in the PR handbook.
“You want him punished?” she asks his wife. “One phone call and I can have him on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow.”
I genuinely thought about this for some time. One phone call for every newspaper's front page? Who could she possibly be calling? I mean, I get the “one phone call and I can have you killed” threat, but that's much easier, not least if she's including the FT.
Wonderfully, just when I thought there was nothing more for the first episode of Flack to give, I realised it still had some left in the tank.
At the start of the episode Robyn’s boss informs her she’s going to a benefit for lesbians that evening. As she’s such a duplicitous PR type, she has decided to approximate the outfit of a lesbian too (“Does this make me look like a lesbian?” she asks. “You misunderstand. I want to look like a lesbian”).
Only now, she takes this plan further: she’s roped in a woman from the accounts department, she tells Robyn, to pretend to be her partner.
Yes, you heard me right. The high-profile head of a multinational PR and crisis-management firm – a firm that specialises in preventing embarrassing and humiliating public relations disasters – is going to Talented Mr Ripley her sexuality for the night.
I'm going to have to watch episode two just to see what happens.
Flack starts on 21 February on W.
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