What You Need to Know About Patrick Melrose , the New Benedict Cumberbatch Miniseries
Benedict Cumberbatch is back on our small screens, this time swapping his Sherlock Holmes cap for a martini glass in the new Showtime mini-series Patrick Melrose. The show is one of a recent crop of prestige adaptations of literary novels (like The Handmaid's Tale, Little Women, Fahrenheit 451, The Child in Time, which also starred Cumberbatch), but Melrose might be the most rarefied to date. If you haven't read the semi-autobiographical novels by Edward St. Aubyn, here's everything to know about Patrick Melrose, in print and on Showtime.
St. Aubyn is an aristocratic British author who had both a charmed and traumatic childhood, growing up in homes in London and France in the 1960s with his mother, who came from a wealthy American family, and his father, who sexually abused him. He eventually attended Oxford in the '80s, where he struggled with a heroin addiction. The five Patrick Melrose novels (Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk, and At Last) are based on his life, exploring the dysfunction of his upper-crust family and his own demons, while recovering and becoming a writer in the process.
If the books sound like a difficult read, they are—but they're also darkly hilarious, especially if you like dry, British humor. Aubyn perfected the anti-hero before it was a trend among prestige television shows like Breaking Bad and Dexter (although, of course, in literature we can trace the drug-addled-but-brilliant protagonist trope to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). And while the novels are visceral about human suffering, they are also about the triumph of the human spirit, and how adversity can break and make you. Accordingly, they've been critically acclaimed, and St. Aubyn has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
That's a tall order for any hour of television to fulfill, but there's a few things to be excited about regarding the Showtime adaptation. For one, obviously, there's Cumberbatch, who can play rich, troubled, brilliant, and English like no one else. (The show has a kind of fabled origin story already; Cumberbatch once said that the only two acting roles on his bucket list were Hamlet, which he played on stage in 2015, and Aubyn's Patrick Melrose.) For another, the show was written by David Nicholls, who wrote One Day (the novel and the screenplay) as well as Bridget Jones's Baby), and has adapted several novels and plays for TV (including Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Far From the Madding Crowd, Great Expectations, and Much Ado About Nothing). And an all-star cast will join Cumberbatch, including Jennifer Jason Leigh as Eleanor Melrose, who looks the other way from her husband's abuse of their son; Hugo Weaving as David Melrose, Patrick's father; Allison Williams as an acquaintance, Marianne; and Blythe Danner as Melrose's wealthy American Aunt Nancy.
It seems like a mini-series was the right way to go with Aubyn's harrowing stories; there will only be five episodes (an anthology style more common in the UK than in the US, where shows and films often hobble on for multiple seasons longer than they should), one for each of the 5 Melrose novels. So far, critics have praised the show as "a finely cut gem, both technically and tonally" and "riveting and excellent", while admitting that some scenes are almost too painful to watch.
There are lots of reasons to anticipate that Patrick Melrose will be Emmy bait at next year's awards, and become the fodder for plenty of critical conversation until then. You'll be able to see for yourself soon if it lives up to the hype, and up to its literary predecessor, on Saturday, May 12, at 9pm on Showtime.
