Best TV series I watched in 2018

Killing Eve

The opening scene of Killing Eve – in which a young, beautiful assassin (Jodie Comer) picked a spot of blood off her watch in a cafe and, on exiting, casually tipped a bowl of ice-cream into the lap of a little girl who had refused to smile at her – was arresting.

But it was our introduction to the woman who would become her adversary that really signalled the ride we were in for with what looked on the surface like another slick spy thriller. Eve (nervily, nimbly played by Sandra Oh) wakes up screaming. Her husband in bed next to her wakes up and scrambles to calm her. What’s wrong? What terrible experiences has life visited upon her? What traumas will inform and be unravelled by the next eight episodes? “I fell asleep on both my arms,” she explains, and they’d gone numb. “I’m sorry. It was scary.”

Killing Eve was a glittering high-wire act of misdirection and subverted expectations. The female protagonists really did exist in their own rights, not merely in relation to the men around them, and they didn’t conform to either gender or genre stereotypes. The brilliantly proficient and prolific assassin Villanelle was not covertly remorseful, on a journey towards an emotional epiphany or nursing a Secret Sorrow; she was a psychopath revelling (as you sense Comer herself, in the middle of a reputation-making performance, was) in her work. Eve was not a coldly driven career woman, inwardly conflicted or hamstrung by the need to reconcile her personal and professional duties while a neglected husband and child sulked mutinously at home. She was an MI5 drone with a nice husband at home, frustrated that she hadn’t done better in her career. When she has an insight into the case of a witness MI5 is assigned to protect, she seizes the chance to run with it.

What followed was a pan-European cat-and-mouse game, with an obliquely Sapphic vibe, as the killer and investigator became increasingly obsessed with hunting each other down.

It was just glorious: a mad game of pinball compared to the sober snooker match of most other murder-based dramas. It provided a playground for the talents of Comer and Oh, plus those of the equally wonderful Fiona Shaw as Carolyn, the head of MI6 Russian operations who recruits Eve; and David Haig as the MI5 associate Bill whom Eve takes with her to MI6; and most of all writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the creator of the equally fearless, complex and disorientatingly surprising Fleabag, who adapted Luke Jennings’s novel Codename Villanelle for the screen.

It was presumably Waller-Bridge’s influence that made Killing Eve, alongside the tension, shocks and gore, so very, very human and so very, very funny – one usually giving rise to the other, as is the way of life. So the hungover MI5 colleagues move as a pack the morning after a party, searching desperately for breakfast bits to mop up their alcohol residues. So Bill, when he learns of his underling’s off-book investigations into the woman she suspects in a string of murders, notes only that: “You could get into a lot of trouble for this if I was a serious man.” So Carolyn apologises to her colleagues before going in to extract information from Eve’s cowardly and potentially corrupt supervisor Frank (Darren Boyd). “I’m sorry you have to see this,” she says, before we cut to her cuddling and comforting him while the drip sobbingly spills all known beans.

However bleak a situation they are in, none of the characters passes up the opportunity for a gag. Which is as it should be. “Well,” says Villanelle’s handler Konstantin, after she returns from a mission to kill a single witness having laid waste to half a hospital’s staff, “That could have gone better.”

The depiction of the petty irritations of office life, the flirtations between colleagues, the odd conversations (“How would you murder me?”) one can have with a spouse without breaking the rhythm of daily life – all this gives Killing Eve a vital grounding in reality and an enduring sense of intimacy, beneath the glamour and gloss of the locations and Villanelle’s wardrobe of designer disguises. It also means the preposterousness of the whole thing doesn’t matter; in fact it only adds to the delight of following these people. And being rooted in reality allows it to mix genres – spy thriller, comedy, action film, workplace drama and, particularly in the episode when Villanelle is forced to work with another pair of assassins, farce – without it collapsing into a tonal mess.

It’s a worthy winner of our countdown. We look forward to the next series and hope that it is good enough to top every poll next year too, because Killing Eve killed it in this.

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