‘Sweetpea’: The Making of a Murderer Has Never Been This Funny

All six episodes of Starz and Sky Atlantic’s extremely black comedy Sweetpea begin with one chilling line of dialogue: “People I’d love to kill.”

In the first episode, which premiered Oct. 10, the show’s protagonist, Rhiannon Lewis ( Fallout ' s Ella Purnell, her eyes enormous), lists a few who have done her a particular unkindness: manspreaders, surly Donna in the mini market, Norman from work, “people who have sex with you and then only reply to your texts with emojis.” It’s the type of theoretical fantasizing many of us have caught ourselves doing on our worst days, but Rhiannon is always having her worst day, and it’s about to become everyone’s problem.

The show, an adaptation of CJ Skuse’s 2017 novel of the same name, begins with the death of Rhiannon’s father, which sends Rhiannon herself into a tailspin. She’s never been particularly great at advocating for her own self-worth, and feels even more invisible at her thankless receptionist job at the local newspaper. Her glamorous sister is hell-bent on selling their father’s house, where Rhiannon has also lived all this time, and, to make matters even worse, the realtor in charge of it all is mean-girl supreme Julia Blenkingsopp (Nicôle Lecky), her old school bully. It’s enough to drive someone to murder. And murder, Rhiannon soon discovers, looks remarkably good on her.

Sweetpea is the kind of dark comedy that balances on the blade of a knife. It’s about death, and killing, and psychological trauma, all of which wouldn’t feel out of place in a stern police procedural or a drama about the challenges of grief. But it treats these themes with a light touch, never outright comedy, but never total tragedy, either, leaving room for a sensible chuckle now and then. As the show moves forward, the episodes end on increasingly intensified cliffhangers, and much of the draw comes from the need to find out how slippery ol’ Rhiannon is possibly going to sneak out of this one.

The rest is a fascinatingly multifaceted character study of a person constantly on the brink of self-destruction. It neither condemns nor excuses its main character’s behavior, clearly more interested in understanding the why of it all. Flashbacks reveal the viscerally dreadful trauma Rhiannon endured through the type of psychological torture particular to bullying among young girls, so bad her anxious scalp-plucking has caused her hair to thin even in adulthood. It’s a very funny show, and a very gruesome show, and also a very sad show, a mean little fable about how the powerful oppress the powerless.

And yet, it constantly seems to argue with itself, in a philosophically entertaining way. Like Fleabag, a similarly unmoored female protagonist, Rhiannon is entirely too self-aware. Like Dexter, a similarly violent criminal bound by a labored system of moral rules, she finds ways to justify her otherwise reprehensible behavior. Other characters challenge Rhiannon’s sense of victimhood, forcing her to ask herself how much of her trauma, her inability to move through the world without feeling attacked on all sides, is self-inflicted.

As the show goes on, it’s difficult not to identify with Rhiannon’s reasoning, or, at the very least, with the desperation that comes from digging yourself into deeper and deeper holes. “Do you see me now?” she snarls as she turns one of her victims into Swiss cheese. As a young woman who, before now, was practically invisible to the people around her, her actions make her feel powerful… which is good! But her newfound sense of self comes from the adrenaline rush of violence… which is bad! How to reconcile these two points?

Where a lesser show would attempt to draw some once-and-for-all moral lesson out of this mess, this one acknowledges the conflict without trying to solve it outright. We’ve all sorta, kinda wanted to maybe just for a second stab someone a little bit at least once in our lives. Sweetpea offers us a deep, dark look at what could happen if we did—and how we might manage to get out of it.

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