3 out of 5

Created by: Jeff Pope

Truth is stranger than fiction, so it goes, and the forever proliferation of true crime shows and dramas – heck, there’s a whole channel dedicated to it – is a drop in the bucket that contains our fascination with our own fucked up selves.  I’ve always been more of an unreality fan myself; I can see “truth” every day, after all, and I don’t necessarily need a book or actor to tell me that the world around me is interesting.  Which is super cynical, of course, and certainly not always the point of non-fiction retellings, but it underlines my negative bias toward what I feel is a key hitch of a lot of true tales, and is present in the three part widower: reality doesn’t have absolute good and evil, and isn’t structured for 90 minute conclusions, or hour long segments.  So when we mold these stories into those structures, either the forced-nature of doing so or, oppositely, the gaps in not doing so become apparent.

The true story of The Widower is, indeed, stranger than fiction: Malcolm, played by Reece Shearsmith, has a tendency to drug and attempt to kill – succeeding in the case of his first wife – the women in his life.  And like all successful sociopaths, he does it while being charming, wooing them until his careless spending habits shove him into a corner in which he can no longer smile, and thus apparently feels like his only way out is to off his so and so.  Because Shearsmith is perfect at playing the insouciantly off-kilter, and because the character, as scripted, is a strange balance of clear affection for these women and yet plagued with an inability to deal with conflict or responsibility, the tale is devastatingly gripping in its ‘I can’t believe he got away with that’ factor.  Because he did, for many years.

But once the main premise is established and we necessarily move on to the story’s next chapter – another woman, another life – Widower’s grip diminishes somewhat, because of those aforementioned gaps: we have to follow this like a character arc; we have to be kept interested and engaged.  This is the writers playing fair, to a certain extent, by keeping Martin’s likeableness mercurial – he’s sniveling, and the extent of his lies are astounding, but again, we sense an odd discrepancy to not want to harm those around him – but this just equals a weird nether realm of holding-pattern syndrome: we now know our required facts, and we’re just waiting for what’s deemed a conclusion.

Which is Martin’s fall, of course, after another attempted-and-failed relationship, to Simone (Archie Panjabi), though it’s suggested he was getting closer to real emotions at that point…

The Widower is a – no pun intended – killer true life story, and it’s brought to life, if not 100% realistically, then within-context believably by some very talented actors and a mostly balanced presentation.  However, the ‘context’ of being a TV show will almost always be a limiting factor, cutting out all the background that informs what we’re seeing and thus requiring some episodic shorthand.  This affects the show’s tension and its characters’ sway over us, but at a relatively short three episodes, the creators wisely got in and out to successfully tell a particular version of events before we can start to really question all of it.

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