Metropolis (TV series)

Critical reception

Eddie Holt of the Irish Times said of the first episode; "We are introduced to the six-pack of Metropolis as they leave Leeds University. Cut to five years later. The three women, Charlotte (Louise Lombard), Sophie (Flora Montgomery) and Tanya (Emily Bruni) are respectively, a junior financial hackette on a magazine, a researcher for the Conservative Party and an agony aunt. Only one of the men, Frank (Kris Marshall), works and he feels compelled to turn the tables on his insurance company employers. As an implausibly idealistic loss adjustor, he is disgusted by the company's scams to avoid pay-outs. He fiddles the claims in favour of the claimants. The other two blokes, Matthew (Matthew Rhys) and Alastair (Jason Barry), have remained dope-smoking slackers. Ambitious Charlotte lives with indolent Matthew. Charlotte acts like a junior Sue Ellen Ewing - lots of lip gymnastics and soulful stares. Mind you, unlike the richter-scale efforts of Texan Sue Ellen, Charlotte's lip tremors are tiny English quivers. Anyway, she cheats on Matthew and takes up with sixty-two-year-old billionaire lecher Milton Friedkin (James Fox). He feeds her career-enhancing stories and she feeds him her twenty-seven-year-old nubility. Primed by her sugar daddy, she gets her "first official byline".

Meanwhile, Tanya is in a car crash. When she wakes up in hospital, a stalker, Nathan (James Purefoy) is managing, quite successfully and utterly unbelievably, to convince her that he is her boyfriend. The crash must have caused selective amnesia, he tells her. Fancying the nutter, she goes along with it in spite of the warnings of Sophie. As an agony aunt, she'd better write a letter to herself pretty quickly, because this one looks like it's going to end in tears if not worse. Metropolis is much more plot-driven than This Life and it's narcissism is not as screaming. Written by Peter Morgan, who has travelled the drugs and rehab circuit, it displays an admirable knowingness in parts. Alastair, a sad buffoon really, has stolen cheques from his parents and is about to check in to an expensive rehab clinic. But the thriller aspect of the series, pivoting on Nathan's stalking of Tanya, is too daft. More credible, given Charlotte's bedding by the wealthy sleazebag, is Matthew's loutish pursuit of frightened, but flattered, Sophie. Atmospheric "big city" shots - trains snaking between high-rise buildings; offices overlooking the bustle of the streets; commuters swarming from the Underground - supply mood and context. Likewise, individual scenes, such as Tanya's accident, partly shot from inside the crashed car.

However, the social context of dynamic, thrusting females and work-shy, parasitic males seems overstated. Perhaps, as hyperbole, this is valid, but as actuality the gender contrast is hardly that stark yet, even among London's graduate twentysomethings. An eight-parter, airing twice weekly, Metropolis presents a cast of characters with obvious similarities to the first-year lawyers of This Life. Charlotte, stuck with a feckless, live-in lover, does a Milly by becoming involved with a powerful, older man. But her ambition also means that she's not unlike Anna, the Scottish siren whose appetite for men was surpassed only by her ruthlessness for career success. No doubt it was tempting to add a thriller dimension to the old formula. But the implausibility of the stalker sub-plot detracts from the aimed-for realism. Of the women, only Sophie, despite reneging spectacularly on her student vow to remain a lifelong socialist, elicits sympathy. The gap between university ideals and job-market realities has always hit twentysomethings, and the atomisation of student friends when career concerns kick-in is a valid theme. Even if you might envy the youth of this sextet, you'd be glad not to have to live their lives."

Cast