3 out of 5

Created by: Joe Barton

covers season 1

While the wikipedia page for Black Doves has a citation mentioning that writer / creator Joe Barton took the show name from a pub, I do like the mash-up imagery it suggests: a bird we normally associate with some kind of gentleness or purity with either the color black, or perhaps the bird that we’d associate with that color – a crow – and its rather suggestively ominous presence. This name is shared with a clandestine group of information brokers in the show, run by Reed (Sarah Lancashire), and counting Helen (Keira Knightley) and Sam (Ben Whishaw) among its members; the imagery mash-up is then also shared with the show’s themes of duality: for Helen, living a life as a dedicated wife of an MP (Andrew Buchan), a long-term sham marriage that’s part of her cover, while she meanwhile double-deals in what she’s learned and maintains an affair on the side; for Sam, it’s somewhat the opposite approach – living as a notorious fixer / assassin, having failed at trying to maintain a steady relationship in the meanwhile. There’s a history of rich texts here of “killers with a heart of gold” from which Black Dove is pulling, while trying to update it with our post-Pulp Fiction appreciation for comedic violence, and the last decades John Wickyness of sanitized, performative fisticuffs, but the blend never quite works – and I think because TV of Black Dove’s era gets in its own way.

The show kicks off with a trio of mysterious killings, Helen’s side beau included, which causes her to reflect on a couple of things: she felt more for him than her job allows, and she maybe let slip some sensitive information to him – also a no-no on the job. She cops to the former to Reed, but is driven to investigate the killing, encouraging Reed to call in Sam to assist. Things spiral from here, scaling up a conspiracy around these killings, as we learn more about Helen’s and Sam’s pasts.

The casting is a bit uneven, but partially due to the aforementioned muddled mash-up. Helen is meant to be a master manipulator, and Knightley sells that perfectly as the housewife, but her pre-Black Dove self feels undefined, with emotions scaling to the way the scene is written instead of feeling organic. Whishaw, in trying to balance his character’s two sides, goes middle of the road muted, and it makes him feel somewhat emotionally detached, but also not necessarily believable as the cold killer fixer. While this fits with the show’s themes of how the “real” side of these two maybe never had the chance to develop, it has the more direct impact of not making them the most engaging leads. This, in turn, makes a lot of the espionage stuff with Reed feel like playacting; the stakes are never quite clear.

The show’s general tone is equally responsible for this, trying to play casual with killing at several points, but then wanting to flip-flop it into heavy tragedy. The latter is where the meat of the show lies; once several plotty puzzle pieces are in place and we can settle into that, Black Doves becomes extraordinarily effective. But prior to that, its over choreographed scuffles feel like action movie necessities; the twist-and-turn storytelling is cut-and-paste stuff that just removes required information until a later point, and doesn’t serve much direct purpose, maybe because we’re in an era of television that demands the other stuff up front, and we’re not patient enough for a more grayly moraled, slowburn drama.

I don’t know if we ever were, frankly, but the more recent “golden ages” of television seemed to come at changing points in viewership habits, when we have a brief window of allowing for some risks in storytelling. At the time of Black Doves, we’re not in that age, so you get something conceptually sound with a very smart underbelly, but a lot of surface gloss that frontloads attempted visual and story cleverness so that we’re distracted or intrigued enough to get to episode 2. Again, this is maybe how television (and movies) have always been, but we’re so far into awareness of tropes that shows like Black Doves go that extra genre mash-up step further to effect it, and it just makes the gap between what works and what doesn’t deeper.

However, a difference here is that the show’s failure at mixing it all together is kind of what kept me watching after all: because there’s this odd happenstance vibe to the way things roll out that made me wonder what the ultimate point would be – like the showrunners weren’t fully committed to that frontloaded stuff – and I’m glad I stuck around for it. Also: kudos to only doing this juggling act for six episodes, as I’m not sure I would’ve held on for even eight.

All of the above is pretty darned negative, when the show is actually pretty okay and then pretty good at the end. Sometimes, though, it’s the ones that swing hard and miss that make you study that miss in more detail, when the swing itself should also be acknowledged.