As titles go, Hit & Miss is up there with As Good as It Gets for riskiness. It’s a clever pun on the subject matter, but if the show isn’t much good, the easiest – if most obvious – review would be three words long.
Happily, this leisurely, morose and curiously bucolic transsexual thriller created by Paul Abbott is a hit not to be missed.
Thirteen years after a role in Boys Don’t Cry – another tale of blurred gender identity – brought her to the attention of the mainstream, Chloë Sevigny stars as Mia, a transgender woman who works as a professional assassin.
Killing for money isn’t a problem until a former girlfriend from her old life dies, naming Mia in the will as the guardian of her four children – including the son she didn’t know she’d fathered. In spite of opposition from her underworld handler, some of the kids in her new family (‘I don’t know about the dick in your pants but you definitely have a dick in your head,’ sixteen-year-old Riley snaps at her new ‘mum’) and some rancorous Yorkshire locals, Mia moves in. Trying to be a mother while still learning to be a woman is difficult enough; combining it with slitting throats and shooting people makes Jean Reno’s struggles to look after Natalie Portman in Leon resemble the end of an episode of Supernanny after Jo Frost has sprinkled her magic parenting dust everywhere.
Although it gently canters along at a pace more akin to the American series alongside which it sits in Sky Atlantic’s schedules than an episode of creator Paul Abbott’s earlier series Shameless, Hit & Miss doesn’t hang around. The premise is dispatched as efficiently as the man executed in a lonely car park at the beginning, with the old adage of ‘show, don’t tell’ rigidly adhered to. Within a few seconds of seeing Mia carry out an assassination, Sevigny’s prosthetic prong is jiggling about freely (although she does spell it out for those not paying attention: ‘I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body’) and it’s only a minute or so later that she learns of her ex’s death and the existence of a family who don’t want any replacement for their late mother – let alone one as unconventional as the contract killer who swigs brandy (‘That’ll put hairs on your chest,’ a barman innocently remarks) and sings Morrissey songs at karaoke.
Sevigny is excellent in the lead role, neither her Irish accent nor her vulnerable intensity wavering for a moment. The supporting cast are similarly impressive – particularly Karla Crome, although she may shine most brightly simply because Riley is the one character not clearly delineated from the beginning as either bad or good.
Local landowner John (Vincent Regan) is clearly a contemptible cock – albeit with some enjoyable lines: ‘Big trouble in little vagina,’ he remarks when Mia gives him the brush-off – whose brutal comeuppance is a pleasure to watch, while at the other end of the scale, Eddie (Peter Wight) seems to be the kindliest gangster this side of James Caan in Mickey Blue Eyes. Riley, meanwhile, nicks Mia’s hormone tablets for a laugh, sleeps with Big Bad John and generally sulks and sneers her way through every other scene, yet still garners sympathy.
The desolate moorland landscape of Yorkshire is the other big star of the show, the achingly empty hillsides reflecting the melancholy that hangs around Mia like the smell of cordite. Whether she finds the fulfilment her life is lacking in the rustic Ridings remains to be seen in the ensuing five episodes, but the combination of uneasy domesticity and dispassionate slaughter makes Hit & Miss compelling viewing from the off.
Aired at 10pm on Tuesday 22nd May 2012 on Sky Atlantic.
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