Babylon

The first episode is as thrilling as it is hilarious. [9 Jan 2015, p.74]

A pretty gritty and compelling drama.

A series whose undercurrent of fatalism might be unpleasant if the characters weren’t so corrosively funny.

What it lacks in depth, Babylon makes up for in range and sudden brilliant commentary.

A scabrous, profane and darkly funny satire.

The in-the-field story lines, with their affairs and guilt and post-traumatic stress, tend toward the sentimental, and the series as a whole is weaker for trying to have it both ways--to be both a no-holds-barred, absurdist satire about the primacy of image-making and a straightforward drama about the nobility of public service.... But the jokes are pretty good over all.... And there are nice performances.

The resonance of this drama with our lives today alone makes it worth a look.

Though Babylon is pleasant and reasonably well executed, there's not too much to grab on to at the center of the drama; it makes moves toward engagement of knotty issues, only to ultimately skate along their surface. But Nesbitt is typically excellent and the show's depiction of London, its cops and its cynical politics can be diverting.

The nastiness of Babylon is refreshing, even while the writing fails to support either the level of acting or the atmosphere, which aspires to something far more clever than what the writers ... have delivered.

The problem lies, as it so often does in shows like this one, with a tonal imbalance in the writing. Attempts at dry, workplace humor are intermingled with commentary on how much perception dictates policy. That’s all well and good but the humor isn’t funny enough and the commentary isn’t sharp enough.

Babylon wants to both mock the no-bull crassness of political wheelers and dealers and cling to a moralistic view of government, and the writers fail to find cohesion between these two perspectives more times than not. As a result, the humor often feels dulled by the relevancy of the subject matter, and the politics come off as both self-serious and frivolous.

At times Babylon feels like it’s paying more attention to comic setups than the drama. At other times it isn’t. It’s not only confusing to viewers, it’s confusing to the cast, whose lines sometimes seem almost cartoonish.