Best Interests is not your typical Acorn TV series. Most Acorn series are light mysteries that you can watch with a bowl of popcorn or laundry to fold. But this series, starring Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen, involves two parents at odds over the decision to keep treatment going for their disabled daughter, who continues to get sicker. This one deserves your undivided attention.
BEST INTERESTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A man lies awake on a couch in his house. He looks at the clock, which says 4:03.
The Gist: Early in the morning, he gets in a car and drives to a courthouse, there, he sees his wife and daughter go into the courtroom, surrounded by reporters and cameras. His wife looks at him and he looks back.
Seven months earlier, we see the same husband and wife, Andrew (Michael Sheen) and Nicci (Sharon Horgan) playing cards on a train. They’re on their way back home from a getaway trip, one that’s sorely needed since they spend most of their energies taking care of their younger daughter Marnie (Niamh Moriarty), who we see during further flashback was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy when she was a baby. Family friends helped Marnie’s older sister Katie (Alison Oliver) take care of her when her parents were away. Of course, Nicci feels guilty about it, but everyone agrees that it was needed.
That night, Marnie coughs and aspirates, sending her to the hospital. Samantha (Noma Dumezweni), Marnie’s doctor at the hospital, tells Andrew and Nicci that Marnie has a serious lung infection and will remain on a ventilator for the time being. As the infection gets worse, Samantha thinks it’s time to start discussing palliative care with Andrew and Nicci; Marnie has been intubated six times in the past year and if they continue to try to treat her, the worse her quality of life will be.
Nicci doesn’t want to hear about palliative care, and she and Andrew broach the idea of a tracheostomy. The doctor disagrees, thinking that the extremely invasive procedure will even take, much less make things better for Marnie. “She still laughs, she still loves. I can still see so much inside of her,” says Nicci. As far as she’s concerned, it’s not up to the doctors to dictate when Marnie gets shifted to palliative care.
The next day, though, Marnie goes into cardiac arrest after a lung collapses and needs to be resuscitated. The lack of oxygen to her brain might have caused damage, and Marnie remains in a coma. But when Marnie’s eyes flutter and her hand tightens on Nicci’s during a visit, Nicci is convinced her daughter will get better.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There aren’t a ton of shows with dying teens out there. There’s The Midnight Club, but that feels like a whole lot different vibe than Best Interests.
Our Take: Written by Jack Thorne, Best Interests is a realistic and affecting look at the emotions involved in caring for a disabled child, and the extremes the parents of that child will go to in order to keep that child alive. With two remarkable lead performances from Horgan and Sheen, the series veers from raw emotion to sentimentality to grief and back again with a seamlessness that mirrors how someone in the situation Nicci and Andrew are in might react in real life.
Both Nicci and Andrew want to fight to keep getting treatment for Marnie, even when her doctor and the hospital think that continuing treatment will, in Samantha’s words, “hurt” Marnie instead of help. But, as we can tell by their separate routes to court at the beginning and end of the episode, Andrew’s desire to fight might not be as resolute as Nicci’s. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the most obvious one is that he can see the pain that his younger daughter is in and may not want to see her suffer just for the sake of still being around. By the time the court fight happens, Andrew might be more resigned to let Marnie go than Nicci is.
At a certain point, we’re going to see that Nicci’s desire to keep fighting to continue Marnie’s treatment is going to hurt her marriage and maybe even her tenuous relationship with Katie. Katie’s perspective here is important, as she’s spent the last 12 years loving her sister but having to deal with constantly being on the back burner of her parents’ attention. When Nicci comes home and says she’s there “for a change of knickers,” Katie not-subtly tells her mother that the knickers line is her catchphrase. There’s no anger in Katie, just resignation, which we see when she gets away to have some time with her girlfriend Hannah (Mica Ricketts).
So there’s a lot of complex emotions and decisions going on here. Even in the first episode, you can see Nicci finding hope where there might not be any, but you completely understand why she can’t let go. If you were in her position, facing the idea of saying goodbye to her daughter, you might try anything you can, too, even if the medical professionals tell you it might cause her pain and won’t extend her life.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: We go back to the scene where Nicci is going up the courthouse steps with Katie and her dad, and she catches the eye of Andrew, who is walking towards the building.
Sleeper Star: Alison Oliver is fantastic as Katie, mainly because she wants what’s best for Marnie, too, but we can see deep down that playing second fiddle to her sister has hurt her deeply.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Best Interests is certainly one of those shows that would be considered a “heavy watch.” But Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen both do a fantastic job of playing parents put in a difficult situation as they have to make literal life-and-death decisions about their disabled child.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Best Interests’ On Acorn TV, Where Sharon Horgan And Michael Sheen Are Parents Fighting Over Keeping Their Daughter On Life Support appeared first on Decider.
