Is in media res and then is The Iris Affair opens. The new caper-drama opens with a man being half-beaten to death while a woman (Niamh Algar) watches with indifference and refuses to hand over the moughfin to the man who ordered the beating (Tom Hollander, channeling Michael Caine). They are watched by a rather concerned teenager, Joey (Maryana Toninsson), who is infinitely more concerned when Hollander-Caine's character realizes that pressing a pistol against the back of her neck might be a better way to get an answer from the moughfin lady. He then realizes he can't stop himself from shooting the kid. But he can order his hired gun to do it. The gunman turns around and we jump to the day before in Sardinia, Italy. And this, my friends, is how you do a prologue. Properly tense, properly disorienting, and long enough that you're really invested and almost forget you know nothing about these people. Just don't kill the kid!
The next few episodes in this eight-parter series crank the pedal to the metal but steer with perfect control of the timeline (another one starts in Florence two years earlier, before Sardinia), locations, revelations, multiple twists, double-crosses, wigs, costume changes, false identities and sets, as the entertainment, both absurd and absurd, takes on a flourishing absurd form.
You see, Algar is Iris Ninix (when she's not using one of those fake identities that include Joey's teacher, Miss Brooke), a super-genius and unstoppable puzzle-solver. She's approached after her biggest success yet, the eccentric entrepreneur, Cameron Beck (Hollander), who "loves helping brilliant people do brilliant things." He takes her to the bottom of his secret lair in Slovenia ("It's actually quite nice upstairs") and shows her "a topological quantum device" that uses 2 million bits of processing power and "non-organic polymers" to create neural pathways and "thoughts that haven't been thought yet." The machine is "before and after" and its name is Charlie Big Potatoes. "Well," she reasons, "it's not a small potato, is it?"
You're either way, way into this by now, or way, way not. I'm all in because writing like this takes courage, and planning and pacing are rare talents – and ones I love to stretch and enjoy. Onward!
All Iris had to do was crack the code by which Charlie Big Potatoes' inventor, Jensen Lind (Christopher Hewett), had hidden the activation sequence that would bring CBP to life. It's somewhere in his closely written, annotated and equation-filled diary, and Jensen can't help because he went mad long ago, grabbed an axe and attacked his creation, and now sits motionless and silent in a wheelchair. "Genius is a good day's madness," Cameron says, looking lovingly at his former colleague. "Jensen ran out of good days."
In the present, it's clear something happened two years ago that really messed up the promising partnership between Cameron and his new genius. He's now funding an international hunt to find her, through an online army that gathers at the Two Seconds to Midnight website run by Alfie Bird (Sacha Dhawan) to track the prize fund and pick up clues and tips. In the front ranks are some corrupt members of the Italian police's special case unit (I think the naming budget went entirely on Charlie Big Potatoes) who find Iris' boyfriend (an Italian cop she's already half-converted and blackmailing), then her address, but not – quite – Iris. The cat-and-mouse game that follows brings back happy memories of Killing Eve until this caper disappears up its own backside. Good times.
The Iris Affair is a playful tale from Neal Crowe, creator of Luther, stylishly and impulsively directed by Terry McDowell and Sarah O'Gorman. Crowe's script is drenched in Drew humor and doesn't leave a hint of cynicism that would kill this enterprise. You have to approach this with your whole heart, or not at all. And Niamh Algar, who specializes in those women who just have had enough of everyone's nonsense – yes, yours, yours and especially yours, damn you – they have the perfect actress for Iris, who is basically a computer and only in her core is she still able to or willing to allow human emotions into her calculations. I hope she can keep this wild ride going for its eight episodes, but I'm halfway and so far so good. Hail Charlie Big Potatoes and all who seek its activation sequence for its non-organic polymer neural pathways! What fun we'll have!