Ripley

It’s been an unusually good year on TV, and the Emmy nominations reflect a quality of both breadth and depth. The likes of Shogun, Slow Horses, Ripley and, of course, Baby Reindeer don’t come along very often, but for them all to be competing against one another is going to give Emmy voters quite the headache. Obviously it’s all but impossible to compare many of these shows; the genre-bending black comic horrors of Baby Reindeer simply aren’t more or less deserving than the elegant noirish depravity of Ripley, both of which are up for Best Limited Series, but the nature of awards is that one has to be accounted the winner, and Richard Gadd’s none-more-hyped show is likely to walk away with several awards, and deservedly so.

At a time when most streaming shows front-load their first episode with all the drama, intrigue and titillation so that the audience will keep on watching, the opening of Steven Zaillian’s Ripley is almost comically counterintuitive. We see Andrew Scott’s Tom Ripley lugging a corpse down a flight of stairs, without explanation as to who he is or who his victim is, and then we begin the series proper, filmed (by There Will Be Blood cinematographer Robert Elswitt) in crisp black and white. Over the course of eight episodes, Zaillian follows Highsmith’s first Ripley novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, reasonably closely, albeit with ornamentations and digressions. But if you had any expectation that this would be an edge-of-seat thriller, well, think again.