This autumn’s rich array of TV drama has pitted original fare against adaptations. On one side, Bodyguard, Black Earth Rising, Press, Strangers; on the other, Vanity Fair, Trust (derived from Getty dynasty biographies), A Discovery of Witches (from novels by Deborah Harkness), Wanderlust (from its writer Nick Payne’s stage play). Until last weekend the original team seemed well ahead in acclaim, but then the ecstatic reviews for Killing Eve pulled their opponents level.
Given her prominence in advance publicity for the show and critics’ raves, you could be forgiven for assuming that Phoebe Waller-Bridge came up with the serial assassin Villanelle and her titular would-be nemesis in BBC3’s Killing Eve. In fact they originated in ebook singles by Observer dance critic Luke Jennings, who had previously helped former MI5 boss Stella Rimington with her spy novels.
The idea of a female criminal converted in jail into a chic killer controlled by a tough male mentor presumably stems from Luc Besson’s 1990 film Nikita, but Jennings seems equally influenced by Ian Fleming in a tone that mixes flippant and serious, and in a protagonist with a deluxe lifestyle (centred on fashion and shopping rather than food, drink and sports). In Killing Eve the 007 setup flipped around – his bed-hopping, globetrotting daredevil with a licence to kill is a woman, and is an arch-enemy of British intelligence, not part of it. But Villanelle is a psychopath? Sure, that’s said of Bond, too.
While Waller-Bridge’s adaptation is strong on useless men, spiky dialogue, and Fleabag-like incidents where the antiheroine behaves like a stroppy or mischievous teenager, her main contribution is refashioning Eve. Jennings’ dogged, drab foil for her protean enemy is brilliantly turned into a kooky, angsty ex-MI5 analyst (an Asian-American expat, as played by Sandra Oh, so like Villanelle in Paris an outsider) morphed by fury into an avenger. New too is the series’ title (Jennings’ original ebooks were brought together as Codename Villanelle).
A strange feature of the autumn’s original offerings has been the early exits of female leads. That won’t happen in this case, and not just because its creator is a woman; another factor is that adapted fiction is benignly constrained by its source book. Becky Sharp, we can be pretty confident, will make it to the end of ITV’s Vanity Fair, but the least likely thing to happen in Killing Eve is someone killing Eve – or Villanelle.
