She said that she saw the message “Be Kind” written in the sky shortly after tragic Caroline’s suicide and she now believes her essence resides in a small tree near her LA home.
#REVIEW FLACK AUTOMATIC EMAIL SENDER SERIES#
A series in which Paquin, Angelson, Okonedo and Wilson sit at a bar talking trash would be more fun than the series Flack more frequently is.Close friend and telly presenter Dawn O’Porter said she is convinced that the late Love Island presenter Caroline Flack is “in the air” and is “watching out for me,” writing love hearts in the sky. Okonedo has some quality, expletive-laden ranting - Pop’s standards appear to allow basically anything on the “language” front - and could mostly benefit from significantly more screen time. The cliche-laden “sister who chose work” versus “the sister who chose family” dynamic gets a big boost from how completely at ease and believable Paquin and Angelson are as siblings. Paquin can’t do anything about how predictable Robyn’s self-destructive tendencies immediately become, but she delivers Lansley’s dialogue well and has good chemistry with both Wilson, enjoyably smiling her way through some peak cattiness, and especially Angelson, saddled with the worst of the show’s “Dear Lord are we doing this exact character again?” archetypes. The better material in Flack is based on character interactions and the cast. I guess there’s a “These are the people behind the rich and powerful, not the rich and powerful themselves” thing at work, though that’s a generous excuse, since without any glitz or glamour, Flack can’t explain what these publicists do or why they do it. The whole series has a slightly ugly shot-on-video look - the constant walking-by-the-Thames visualization of London has a thematic explanation, yet still becomes monotonous and limiting - and the production design in Robyn’s office and the various posh hangouts all fall short. They only occasionally interact as a unit either because Flack was working around the schedules of its busy cast or for budgetary reasons, and while I suspect the former, the show looks cheap enough that it could also be the latter. Robyn’s co-workers include a barb-spewing boss (Sophie Okonedo’s Caroline), a posh-and-profane colleague (Lydia Wilson’s Eve) and an obligatory wide-eyed neophyte (Rebecca Benson’s Melody). Flack‘s episodic plotlines are weak, though there’s a bottle episode on a plane featuring Bradley Whitford that’s probably a bit better than that, but that doesn’t mean the show lacks for foundational elements. In length as well as execution, these opening Flack episodes are reminiscent of the short first Scandal season in which Olivia Pope - insert “More like Olivia Pop!” joke here - and her team solved a case per week that rarely clarified what any of their jobs were and rarely tied into anything bigger. The show is timely only in a superficial way, which probably means it ought to be funnier than it is. Because every bit of fixing descends into silly puppet master machinations, it’s also hard to take anything Flack has to say about celebrity or the artificiality of fame seriously. Every episode of Flack finds Robyn and the bits and pieces of her firm’s oddly disparate team eying a catastrophe and blithely declaring, “OK, let’s stage a farce sex tape!” or “OK, let’s stage a farce wedding!” Lansley’s instinct, and therefore Robyn’s instinct, to reduce his main character’s allegedly high-pressure occupation to these sorts of facile hijinks drains Flack of any unfolding stakes and, what’s worse, makes it very hard to respect Robyn and her abilities. Or maybe my day-to-day dealings with publicists just haven’t caused me to realize that what publicists do is orchestrate weekly farces.
To say that Flack can’t quite bring itself to clarify what it is that a publicist/PR rep actually does would be putting it lightly. Oh and I’m completely ignoring that Flack rips off the Mad Men pilot for its primary semi-surprise. Offering a role model possibly in both regards is Robyn’s sister, Ruth (Genevieve Angelson), a mother of two who seemingly has everything under control, except for when she doesn’t. The war within Robyn, instigated on a primal level by memories of her late mother, concerns whether she can find bliss with her too-perfect boyfriend (Arinze Kene), complete with domestic stability and kids, or whether she’s destined to just become a train wreck.