You’ll Fall for The Fall (I Did!)
By Robert Herold
I admit it, I’m in love with the BBC series The Fall; it does give me pause, however, to realize that so much of the show concerns dysfunctional love. The show succeeds on numerous levels: The writing is particularly smart, the acting first-rate, and the setting, Belfast, Northern Ireland, lends another textural layer to this gritty drama. The show concerns serial killer Paul Spector, played by Jamie Dornan (who also stars in Fifty Shades of Gray), and the efforts to stop him by the Belfast police, headed by Detective Superintendent Stella Gibson (a role written for Gillian Anderson). The show is currently available in the U.S. on Netflix. Incidentally, it’s odd that both this, Happy Valley, and other BBC shows are being billed in America as “Netflix original series.”
The show’s creator, writer of all the episodes, and director of season two, Allan Cubitt, does a number of interesting things with this series. To begin with, he reveals the perpetrator within the first few minutes of the first episode; nevertheless, the show manages to be very suspenseful. The tension comes, in part, from not only making the victims seem like real people, but also making the perpetrator seem real. The former serves to increase the poignancy of the tragedy faced by the victims and their families (something often lacking in crime dramas and whodunnits). The latter shows the incredible banality of evil and the thin line between it and normalcy. How far are we from such dysfunction? Where will he/we go next?
Another facet of this show is that Cubitt does an amazing job exploring the psychopathology of Spector (a great name!), and often does the same for many of the other characters as well. He regularly mirrors behaviors between Spector and Gibson, e.g., alternating shots of the two of them exercising, the fact that they both keep journals, the compartmentalizing of their lives, and the willingness of both to use people to further their aims.