Face it: We all think about how we’re going to die. We think it’s going to be this peaceful moment with light streaming into our bedrooms as we drift away surrounded by family and friends. But the reality is harsher than that; we’re often in a hospital bed, hooked to machines, sometimes unrecognizable to the people that love us the most. A new series finds a group of friends in the seventies contemplating their ends, and looking to do something to make their final moments a lot more dignified.
TRUELOVE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A woman is in a bathroom, unloading a cartridge from a gun and wrapping the gun and cartridge in a towel. She sees a drop of blood on her cheek and wipes it off.
The Gist: One year earlier, we see that woman, Phil (Lindsay Duncan) driving to a small town for a funeral. Her old friend Ken (Clarke Peters) is also seen arriving at the funeral. Phil comes in late, but finds the group of friends she and Ken go way back with: David (Peter Egan), Tom (Karl Johnson) and David’s wife (who is also Tom’s sister) Marion (Sue Johnston). They’re all there to pay their last respects to their friend Dennis.
At the pub after the funeral, Tom tells the group that cancer took Dennis and by the end he was unrecognizable. As they have multiple rounds, they drunkenly decide to make a pact with each other: If one of them is gravely ill, the others will help them kill themselves. The group figures Ken, with his SAS background, and Phil, who is a retired police detective, will be especially good at doing the deed and leaving no trace of what happened.
It’s evident that Ken and Phil have a history, as Phil proposes Ken join her in her room at the local inn. But they think better of it; they see each other the next day, though, when she calls Ken to vouch for her when she’s pulled over for DUI while hungover.
Eight months later, Phil is reluctantly planning on downsizing their living situation with her husband Nigel (Phil Davis) and their daughter when she gets a postcard that says “Truelove,” the code word that Tom made up, on it.
She travels to a shore town and meets Ken there. The person who called them there is Tom; he’s been given a terminal cancer diagnosis and wants has a plan for Phil and Ken to help him die on his terms. Ken is especially appalled by the request and the two of them refuse. But when Tom is hospitalized after trying to hang himself, at the very least Phil figures helping him die is a whole lot better than the alternative.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Charlie Covell and Iain Weatherby, Truelove has the “group of friends keeping secrets” vibe that we’ve seen in recent shows like Bad Sisters.
Our Take: While Truelove is about this group of six friends, it seems that most of the story revolves around Phil and Ken. It could be because the two of them had a romantic fling decades ago, and their chemistry even in the present day suggests that they were each other’s ones that got away. Or it could just be that, as a former cop and SAS officer, respectively, the two of them have the most capacity to do what Tom and perhaps even David and Marion might ask them to do.
But Duncan and Peters also do a good job of showing the myriad issues a person has to deal with once they reach “that age.” While both are in their seventies and seem like they could live another 20 years, they’re both feeling their mortality in different ways. Phil laments that she and Nigel have already downshifted into a slower pace of life, one that she’s not necessarily in favor of. In addition, she thinks downsizing her living situation is the first step that will lead her to a nursing home. Ken lives alone, and he knows that he doesn’t want to live out the rest of his days that way.
The show takes the issues of aging, mortality, euthanasia, and the fact that modern medicine tends towards keeping people alive past the point where their quality of life suffers, and wraps it all into this story.
We’re not sure if the only member of the group who dies is Tom, with Phil and Ken spending the rest of the limited series dodging questions from law enforcement, or if other members of the group will request their help. What we do know, though, is that Truelove is an emotionally-charged treatise on aging, loyalty and friendship, with characters who are determined to keep living life and, when the time comes, not wither away like so many others in their age group.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: After Tom brings Phil and Ken out to his boat for what he calls a “dress rehearsal,” it turns out to be the real thing. The last scene shows Phil and Ken in the speedboat they took to see Tom, speeding away from Tom’s boat as it takes on water.
Sleeper Star: Phil Davis’s Nigel is a bit of a drip, but he also seems much happier with his downshifted existence than Phil is.
Most Pilot-y Line: Phil interrupts the vicar that’s giving Dennis eulogy and tells her that Dennis was never called “Den,” as the vicar called him.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Truelove is the rare show that can combine elements of a thriller with real emotional propulsion. The fact that it addresses so many issues about aging, illness and death in a way that’s more matter-of-fact than maudlin is an achievement.
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: ‘Truelove’ On Acorn TV, Where A Group Of Old Friends Make A Death Pact That Tests Loyalties And Reveals Secrets appeared first on Decider.
