The second series of the Spanish prison drama has broken away from the cliches – but it’s hard to know if the element of camp is entirely intended. Plus: The Good Fight
Setting a TV series within the walls of a prison all but guarantees sex, drugs, violence and some sort of showdown in the laundry room where bad things happen with hot things, but prison dramas can also be prone to boxing themselves in too quickly. Once the key is turned in the lock, there are only so many storylines to explore. There will be a scuffle over who is top dog, some sort of unlikely same-sex romance, a corrupt prison officer who probably has sex with the inmates, a riot, an attempt to run the prison nicely, an attempt to run the prison strictly, and an escape. During its first series, the Spanish drama Locked Up (Channel 4) – known in its home country as Vis a Vis; slang, apparently, for conjugal visits – ticked off a vast majority of those tropes. It followed the blonde, soft, middle-class Macarena Ferreiro, who had to learn to adapt to life behind bars after she was banged up for fraud. So far, so Bad Girls, so Orange Is the New Black.
But, in starting its second and final series with most of the lead characters not only escaping, but getting away with it, for now, Locked Up appears to be ready to go off into new, unexplored territory. I suspect that, like Line of Duty, if you haven’t seen it before, you may wish to do your homework before leaping in. Essentially, it follows straight on from the season-one finale and there’s no time for unnecessary exposition or explaining why, for example, the sinister queen bee Zulema’s escape van is full of €500 notes, or why the women’s disguises – wide-brimmed hats, lipstick, movie-star shades – scream “we are in disguise” quite so conspicuously.
That said, this is both a tremendously silly and fantastically taut thriller that carries itself at a breathless pace. Macarena’s journey from naif to hardened criminal is complete in the first five minutes, when she accidentally bumps someone off. “She’s dead. What a pity,” shrugs Zulema, adding an unprecedented amount of menace to such a nonchalant statement. There are plenty of lines that are deliciously over the top, in translation at least, adding an element of camp that may not be entirely intended – “It’s not good to mix business and cunnilingus”, for one, could quite easily appear as the punchline in a drag show.
By the end of this series opener, everything is set up for disaster: the corrupt insiders look as if they will take over the prison, ruling over the remaining women with violence and fear. Zulema, Macarena and the rest of the escapees are living out their Casablanca-meets-Shawshank-Redemption liberation on the beach – although they have run into trouble, what with almost killing one of the locals and all the members of their promised escape crew being executed en route. And the entire Spanish police force are on their tails, because, obviously, their huge hats are easy to pick up on CCTV. I’m still confused about who the Syrian and the Egyptian are, but the rest of series two is already on Walter Presents, and I’m convinced enough to go back and start from the beginning, if only to see what they got up to in the laundry room before they tunnelled out.
The spectacularly entertaining Good Wife spin-off The Good Fight (More 4) really hit its stride this week, with an episode titled like a Radiohead album: Stoppable: Requiem for an Airdate. Like the show from which it came, The Good Fight turns real-life headlines into plots, and uses the current political climate as the glue to stick its stories together. This outing sees a TV writer who is being sued by his network for leaking an unaired episode of a popular crime series online; he wrote it, and believes it was pulled because it was too critical of the Trump administration. Boseman defends him, and it looks as if they’re losing in court – until Trump tweets about the case and inadvertently makes it into an issue of free speech. With the help of Lucca – who is rapidly turning into my favourite fictional lawyer, even if she does appear to be falling for the suave and smarmy Colin – the pair turn it around.
There are plenty of characters rolling over from The Good Wife. A chance meeting with Diane brings the sizeable business of tech billionaire Neil Gross back into her domain and changes her leverage within Reddick, Boseman & Kolstad yet again. And the divisive Elsbeth Tascioni continues to protect the firm’s interests against Mike Kresteva (a bulldog-like Matthew Perry, in his best role in years) using some unconventional methods, such as befriending his wife and inviting herself round to drink wine and make it known that she is not to be messed with. Some Good Wife fans find Elsbeth to be unbearably quirky, but as she’s usually sticking it to someone deserving, I can just about get on board. Unlike Locked Up, you can dip into The Good Fight without much previous knowledge; it only seems to be getting better, so do give it a go.
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