Sweetpea Review – Ella Purnell’s Deadly Boring Serial Killer Series Reeks of Cowardly Decision Making | TV

I I was delighted to hear that CJ Skuse’s Sweetpea (the first in a series of five books) was being adapted for television. The entire series is wonderful, but the first is the one to beat. Sweetpea is the story of Rhiannon, a serial killer of (mostly) evil (mostly) men. He takes off straight away and never lets up, blackly comic, as brutal in his social commentary as our girl with a knife, and with a joke that just isn’t right as if lovingly sharpened. Rhiannon is that rarest of creatures: an uncompromising female protagonist, written just as uncompromisingly by her female creator.

Her backstory is such that one cannot be sure whether nature or nurture made her a psychopath, but she definitely is a psychopath. According to a BuzzFeed quiz she took, it’s at least 82%. Rhiannon’s voice sings from the page, the plot offers one twist after another, the tension rises as the body count increases, and there isn’t a wasted scene or word. Please read them – they will do your heart (especially if it is female and full of repressed anger) good.

Read them first, in lieu of the Sky film adaptation, which has been stripped of everything that makes the books great. It’s a flat, boring six episodes that seem to go on forever. Every possible punch is pulled, every barb pulled, every joke cut off. This Sweetpea (played by Fallout and Yellowjackets’ Ella Purnell, making the most of a role that, had she read the book, she would never have dreamed would be such a bleak role) becomes mostly driven by a desire for revenge against a mean girl at school. Instead of Skuse’s warrior, we have a petulant child. Skuse’s Sweetpea gathers friends (or rather picso – “people I can’t shake”) around her to make them seem normal. She uses them and her day job as a cover so she can carry out her vigilante murders without suspicion. The television Sweetpea is driven to her first murder by circumstances, rather than actively seeking it out like the original. She is the opposite of a psychopath. She is a drop. And drops are very boring.

Instead of murders, there are cat fights and a pale love triangle that only carries a fraction of the charge of the original in its final moments. Instead of a funny, grim narrator, we have a script devoid of humor, drive or depth. Instead of a perpetrator boasting of her murderous gifts, we are dealing with a victim who is crying and vomiting and very, very slowly working her way toward semi-catharsis.

The series reeks of cowardly decision-making at every turn. The book is a story of female anger and male violence and it seems that none of the participants wanted to deal with this unpleasant fact in the slightest. It’s also about the resilience and distortion of children, about the power of parents, about the question of whether we are born the way we will be or whether we are made into what we become. And it’s about the possibility of redress – and whether a normal value of 18% means that it can or should be taken care of.

Sky’s “Sweetpea” is about – nothing. It’s about a mouse-like woman who wants to be more visible and confident and indirectly becomes so after she kills and kidnaps some people. But the journey is never believable, not least because it is so hampered by the pathetic desire to make the heroine sympathetic and – all I know is that word was sprinkled more generously at every meeting than the arterial blood of a sweetpea victim – relatable make. In fact, the main effect is to make us grow more fond of mean girl Julia (Nicôle Lecky), simply because she’s less boring.

In a world of unnecessary voiceovers, it’s a particularly bitter blow to realize that the only drama that cries out for it – Skuse’s series lives and dies by Sweetpea’s voice and the unfettered access we have to her unique thoughts – isn’t for it thought appropriate to deliver it. Again, the lack of this, the failure to translate a significant portion of Sweetpea to the screen, and the refusal to incorporate difficult parts of the book into the story reeks of angst.

And if you haven’t read the books and don’t know what you’re missing? I suspect it would still feel inadequate and unconvincing – no more than serviceable. The story is thin, the motivations thinner and the stakes low. You don’t have to have experienced Sweetpea in its original, wonderful form to find drops boring. You take care of it yourself.

But as a missed opportunity to bring something fresh, fun and genuinely quirky to the screen, it’s infuriating. It would make Rhiannon murderous. I wonder if Skuse feels the same way?