Steven Moffat’s Shows are Not Very Good
his reign of terror must end
I recently finished watching Inside Man, the BBC’s latest limited thriller series. Created by Steven Moffat, it asks some big questions: what would it take for you to turn to murder? Who are we, behind the facades we create? And why does Moffat keep getting commissioned?
At first glance, the show is great. The acting is excellent — as you would expect from its all-star roster, with David Tennant, Stanley Tucci, and Lydia West taking leading roles, bolstered by a strong supporting cast. But, the further you get into the four episodes, characteristic Moffat-isms start to emerge.
Moffat is perhaps most infamous for Sherlock, one of the most popular (and then most reviled) British TV series of the 2010s. Tracking the evolution of public opinion on the show is fascinating. Even its cult-like followers gave up on defending it after its catastrophic final(?) season, leading to further criticism of earlier episodes as the cracks started to show—or, perhaps more accurately, as people started to acknowledge them.
I really enjoyed Sherlock when it came out. It was funny, scary, and puzzling all at once, with personable characters, complex storylines and a chirpy theme song. The modernisation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories was fun, and often inventive, and the fact that the show didn’t shy away from leaving its audience with major cliffhangers gave it even more of a prominent place in the zeitgeist. A shame, then, that it so quickly went downhill.
TIme for me to start complaining!
My first gripe is that Moffat’s women are not the greatest, to say the least. He seems to like to write women who are Just There, before revealing that, look! They have a dark side! They’re violent!
This is seen in Sherlock, with John’s wife Mary being revealed to be a secret agent in a twist that came out of nowhere, made no sense, and undermined any character development from earlier instalments. Rather than being ‘a woman’, she has to be ‘a woman who is perhaps evil, or at the very least morally ambiguous’. Irene Adler is a fun reversal of this, with her dominatrix evilness and intelligence rectified by her weakness being that terrible womanly trait of emotion. Of course she’s in love with Sherlock — we couldn’t possibly have a woman win against him, despite what Conan Doyle might say.
In Inside Man, this is even more frustrating. The vicar’s (Harry’s) wife, Mary (an interesting repetition, no?), is shocked by the fact that her husband has locked a woman in the basement. But the next responses we see from her are 1) to wonder what food their captive, Janice, would like; and 2) to contemplate murder. Juxtaposing this domestic question with one of violence is clearly meant to be humorous, and it is, to an extent, but considered alongside Moffat’s other female characters it further evidences this trend of his women (domestic, gentle creatures) being revealed to have a dark side (casual propensity for violence). In fact, throughout the series, Mary is the one who most fervently pushes for murder. And in the end, when the stress of being an accidental kidnapper is really starting to get to her and she’s menaced someone with a bread knife, pushed someone down the stairs, and is trying to plant evidence, she gets hit by a truck. Just when things are starting to get interesting, she’s taken out of the equation.
Janice-in-the-basement is bestowed a similar fate (sans truck). She’s smart, we’re repeatedly told. She’s a bit odd, she doesn’t really have friends. This establishes her as the perfect basis for Woman With Dark Side — she is intelligent, ergo, she can be conniving. As she tries to find a way out of the basement, she behaves as if she has the upper hand, attempting to manipulate her captors and shooting cool smirks and determined glances at their backs. But rather than Mary’s end, she is able to fulfil this potential. An after-credits scene reveals her appealing to Grieff to help her kill her husband, who up until this point has never been mentioned or even hinted at. How she got the money to fly to Death Row on her tutor’s salary is not explained, a small detail that nonetheless stuck out. Janice’s character careens around from manipulative genius to vulnerable victim, with neither really committed to.
The final item I’ll add to this list is a moment that almost made my jaw drop. Morag, a burglar-criminal nefarious type introduced in the third act, is asked by journalist Beth why she works with Grieff when he is a violent misogynist (something which is never actually evidenced — yes, he killed his wife, but Moffat never tells us why. We don’t know that he killed her because she was a woman, and he has never expressed any aggression towards other women as far as we know). At this junction, Moffat decides to put in a Deep Moment, and reveals to us that Morag works with this woman-hating(?) criminal because she, like all women, Moffat confidently says, is internally misogynistic. Not only is it patronising, it’s poorly written. A failure on moral and artistic levels.
Aside from the Woman Problem, Moffat also writes as if he thinks he is far smarter than the viewer, which due to the fact that he is not results in considerable plot holes, a lack of consistency, incomprehensible characters, and poorly-written dialogue. In one emotionally-charged discussion, as Mary pleads with her husband to try and get him not to turn himself in to the police, religion is shoehorned in. Well, maybe not shoehorned, as Harry does mention at least once every five minutes that he is, in fact, a vicar, and that therefore he would never hurt anyone ever, not even the woman he has locked in his basement. Tennant gives his wife a tearful look and explains his faith, stating that Christianity is “the only religion where God dies at the end”. I’ll give you a moment to sit with that one.
There’s no ambiguity in this statement. It’s just a strange line that is obviously meant to be very deep and make you think “wow, now this is a script”. Moffat clearly doesn’t understand one of the broader concepts of Christianity, which is fine, but you’d think that if he was creating a series about a vicar, set for much of the time in a vicarage and church, where the vicar talks about vicarly things like, for example, God, he might have done a little research first.
Circling back to the fact that Harry seems to believe that the fact that he is a vicar (albeit a cool one who swears sometimes) makes him exempt from doing evil; he fails at this from the starting blocks. By the end, we’re meant to realise that good people do bad things if circumstances align, that everyone has the potential for evil, that sometimes trying to protect those we love can cause them more harm (see: Mary and the truck). But Harry’s decisions aren’t all that moral from the get-go. He takes a USB from his verger despite knowing that there’s something not so great on it (even if he doesn’t know the specifics yet); he willingly and continuously protects a paedophile (his motivations for which are never really explained); and his apparent need to protect humanity doesn’t seem to extend to the victims of abuse that he sees on the aforementioned USB.
None of Moffat’s characters are fleshed out enough to be believable or even very interesting. Once you scratch the surface of their general roles — morally ambiguous genius, confused sidekick — and their turgid dialogue, delivered as if it has meaning, then you’re not really left with very much. Moffat’s series often have great actors, who do the best they can to make something of what they’re given, but strong performances don’t fix the continuous shortfallings of the source material.
Moffat’s series are faulted from start to finish, with stories that make no sense, plot holes as far as the eye can see, and dreadfully-written female characters. His recent projects have been poorly received, from Sherlock’s finale to Dracula and now Inside Man, and the most interesting storyline he’s got going for him at the moment is how he still has a successful career.