The Rig

This is middling in the grand scheme, but if you enjoy this particular genre (iso-horror?) there are plenty of worse ways to spend your time. The casting is excellent (superficially, the plethora of Scottish accents alone are worth the price of admission for me), John Strickland (Line of Duty, Big Love) does exactly what he needs to do as director, and there’s real suspense and real agony within the narrative.

While there isn’t a ton of character development as The Rig starts, the acting is excellent, and it makes the tension that’s building on the Kinloch Bravo feel palpable.

Macpherson doesn't reinvent the sci-horror wheel, save for a bit of eco-horror philosophizing here and there. But the show is effective in a nuts-and-bolts thriller way, with a cast of game Scotsmen (and a few others) grimly solving problems ranging from mutinies to prophecies to apocalyptic mechanical disasters.

There are times when The Rig plays as a seabound Alien. Other times, the eco/oil theme, while worthy (see also State of Happiness and the latest series of Borgen), skews the script, with clunky asides about sustainable fishing, the Earth’s crust and an extinction event (“The great dying”).

It’s a modern take on an old narrative form, and if there’s nothing as earthshaking dramatically speaking as whatever the Big Bad is managing as it comes for our crew, the need to know what’s what – including Glen’s Secret Sorrow and the role Mark Addy, who has yet to turn up unless I’ve failed to spot him under all the safety gear, is going to play – and the faith that it won’t all descend into a Lost-style debacle will keep you going until the end.

If it had been squashed into 90 minutes, The Rig might work. But spread over nearly six hours, it feels slack and at times, a bit naff.