Andrew Lincoln has been Rick Grimes – the leader of a group of survivors of a zombie plague in Frank Darabont’s at first mesmeric and then mesmerically dull post-apocalyptic series The Walking Dead – for 15 years. Off and on (and in a spin-off) but mostly on. Now, at last, he is free. He’s had a shower, a haircut and – thank God – cleared his throat after a decade and a half of rattling phlegmily through increasingly ropey scripts and pretending to care about his son Carl, and is appearing on stage in The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge theatre, London and on our screens in the fairly bananas thriller Coldwater.
You can see what attracted Lincoln to the part. John is the anti-Grimes. We meet him (once the obligatory opening scene of the character covered in blood and running through some woods is over and we’ve flashed back to “Two months earlier”) fleeing the sight of a man in the playground beating up a woman, so panic-stricken that he leaves one of his two children there and has to go back for her. The family then moves to Scotland for a fresh start, although his high-flyer wife, Fiona (Indira Varma), seems far too intelligent for us to believe that she would countenance this as the answer to his post-playground PTSD and/or be married to a berk.
For a berk John is. A supposedly willing househusband, he is bad with the kids and fails to keep on top of domestic matters, dumping them all back on Fiona the minute she walks in the door after work. He also can’t manage sex with her, though he’s OK when left to his own devices in the shower. I don’t know who to write to in order to beg for a different way of announcing that a show is going to deal with the crisis in modern masculinity, but there has to be someone. Or at least a helpline I can call.
Still, the petty grievances of marriage are nicely interwoven with its vital practicalities in a way that helps keep the storyline engaging, when it could easily have devolved into complete nonsense. Conversations about feeling “old and shit” take place around compiling shopping lists; a laugh about “lady vicars” is shared amid a row about going next door for dinner; the sex thing matters but does not matter; rage and resentment fester for lack of time as much as unwillingness to deal with them – truly all of marital life is here.
But John is still a berk. Also an unlucky berk, who becomes the target of a local bully, Angus Gillespie (Lorn Macdonald), after seeing him trying to intimidate the village’s young shop assistant, Catriona (Lois Chimimba). Plus, his new neighbours are a married Christian couple whose vibe is … distinctly off. Rebecca (Eve Myles) is a (lady) vicar who doesn’t believe in God but possibly believes in sapphism with the woman next door. Tommy (Ewen Bremner, head shaved, unblinking stare turned up to 11, no way this is going anywhere good, even before it is revealed that Tommy is almost as obsessed with serial killers as he is with leading them to salvation) really does believe in God and senses in John fruit ripe for the picking.
Before you know it, but long after you’ve predicted it, Angus and John meet again, this time in those dark woods we saw John run through in the opening scene. Angus tries to throttle him; John brains him with a rock too many times to claim it was self-defence, and runs home only to be intercepted by the evangelical Christian with a serial killer obsession who offers to help clear up the mess. John, the berk, accepts – and then we’re really off to the races.
By episode two, Coldwater has developed overtones of Deliverance-in-the-Highlands as Tommy begins upping the ante, Rebecca’s character becomes more fully fleshed out, and their relatively normal son grows suspicious of the increasing shenanigans (and the box of trinkets in Daddy’s shed). Catriona throws her own spanner in the works and there is a growing sense that the rest of the Bible study group wants watching too.
It’s quality hokum, and if the examination of toxic masculinity and marriage gets subsumed along the way, I think I’d rather have a Highland village filling with murders than another shower scene by quite some distance.
Coldwater aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now.