10 best shows you slept on in 2018

A Very English Scandal

Hugh Grant’s fascinating 2018 career renaissance (see also: Paddington 2) continues with this extremely entertaining BBC drama that’s soapy and scathing by turns. Based on a real British scandal from the 1970s, it follows the story of Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe, who was charged with putting a hit out on his former lover, Norman Scott.

Thorpe, who was a rising star in British politics at the time, was fairly desperate to deny and/or perhaps literally erase the affair, because although homosexuality had been decriminalized nearly a decade prior, social attitudes had not shifted much yet on the issue. Grant plays Thorpe like the sleazebag he so clearly was, a man who marries women for convenience and clinically debates the pros and cons of having someone he was once close to killed. (Just try and sit this character next to Grant’s PM from Love Actually and not want to throw up. Whew.) Ben Whishaw, normally famous for playing a wide variety of waifish, damaged types, here throws himself into the role of Thorpe’s on-again, off-again romantic partner with gusto; he’s defiant, unstable, and vaguely irritating all at the same time.

The three-part series is great fun to watch, embracing England’s simultaneous love of both stiff upper lip reserve and tabloid journalism and mixing it all up into a strangely sad comic caper. It’s almost quaint to remember a time when political careers could be ended by something as simple as the concept of shame – Thorpe was ultimately acquitted of his attempt to kill Scott, but not absolved, and he faded from public life almost immediately afterward.