Sweetpea
Ella Purnell in the main poster for ‘Sweetpea’, now airing on Sky/Now in the UK and week-to-week on Starz in America. Courtesy of Starz/Sky, made accessible via CNET. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
The worldview of the calculated serial killer is one well-documented by now in popular fiction. From the revisionist history surrounding Christian Bale’s titular maniacal consumerist in American Psycho to the half-baked, methodical takedown of millennial culture in Netflix’s You, the genre—like many others, including superheroes, horror, and teen dramas—has clearly grown eager to deconstruct, desperate to still have something to say. Call it morbid affinity—in a landscape defined by poor media literacy—but we seem to lap it up each time, regardless of the quality of the subtext or reflexive standing. Case in point: the ratings juggernaut that has been Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, Ryan Murphy as a producer at his most grossly exploitative. Death has thus become a prestige, tabloid affair, watered down for churn on streaming platforms, making it nigh impossible to find something truly original or clever in execution.
Sweetpea, however, succeeds by attempting to rehabilitate the genre—a breath of fresh air in a largely androcentric pool of content. Based on the C.J. Skuse novels that gained bloody renown for satirizing the bounds of journalistic integrity, Fallout and Yellowjackets star Ella Purnell captivates as protagonist Rhiannon Lewis in her mundanity: a young woman on the fringes, persistently sidelined and mocked for her introversion. Up against a glass ceiling, she is relegated to a receptionist role at her local newspaper, a flower on the wall to conversations held exclusively between her male colleagues (the show’s title, “Sweetpea,” representing a moniker of belittlement bestowed upon Rhiannon by her patronizing boss). The effect is claustrophobic, and it is no wonder the tormented Rhiannon eventually snaps; even to the women in her life, she is seen as other—freakish and off-putting. It is a characterization which earned her bullying in a past life at the hands of the vanguard at secondary school, most critically by one Julie Blenkingsopp (portrayed by Nicole Lecky), and something that she learns she can never escape upon Julie’s unexpected return.
Therein lies Rhiannon’s central trauma, conveyed by way of her gripping, oftentimes whimsically macabre inner dialogue, which we, the audience, are entreated to hear throughout the six episodes of the show’s limited season. It's a literary device well-tread, especially in current anti-hero(ine) entertainment (à la the British-born Fleabag, Killing Eve, and Baby Reindeer), which might make it seem tired and tropey to some, or else a cheap way to earn relatability points (“journeying into their inner realm,” of what makes an outsider tick, and all), but I believe Purnell and the writers imbue it with enough edge that it gets off on this slight. What begins as a harmless revenge fantasy for Rhiannon soon devolves into actuality as her desires come to fruition, and the reasons behind why she is the way she is are actually very compelling to witness unravel, skewed by/sporting a warped moral compass beneath her otherwise unassuming exterior.
In fact, the character work in its core cast is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Sweetpea, though even this is not without its caveats. For as much as there is fresh air in its twists and turns, there is surprisingly a lot of dead air, with decompressed storytelling and, at times, woefully predictable or unsatisfying plot beats that come out of leftfield. Most egregiously, Rhiannon is said to gain mastery of her voice by killing, rejecting the submissive acceptance that came to define her timid outer appearance. However, this occurs largely through flagrant coincidence, humanized only in hindsight by learning of the nature of her victims’ crimes after the fact. It could be a rousing, layered philosophical question: what happens when the people you kill turn out to have been utterly reprehensible? Yet, less of a vendetta, and more happenstance, we are supposed to believe through the clichéd use of Billie Eilish’s 'you should see me in a crown' that the violence she perpetrates is vigilantism, undercutting the nuance had. It is particularly upsetting because, on the newsroom floor, Rhiannon so deftly comes to take control of her victim complex, using information as a weapon in her one-woman war.
For a show about murder, which is treated with a certain normalcy (a bit like Channel 4’s The End of The F**ing World*’s stylized psychopathy), it isn’t necessarily reveled in; there is very little gore in Sweetpea, and while at the center of the narrative, it more so inhabits a space at its periphery, subdued. What takes precedence is a story of very real trauma and idealized downfall, masquerading as a darkly comic serial killer thriller, and its strengths lie in the doubles that come to be tied to the titular protagonist (Julie, Leah Harvey’s DC Marina Farrar, and Calam Lynch’s reporter AJ) and the trajectory their relationships take. Words cut deep in Rhiannon’s life, and while Sweetpea sometimes does not puncture, it is a fine incubator for the future of British talent.
