Review – Assassinate boredom with Sandra Oh’s superb new show Killing Eve

A lot of us held the highest of high hopes for Killing Eve, the new TV show starring Sandra Oh. Oh hasn’t had a huge television role since her iconic performance as Dr. Cristina Yang on Grey’s Anatomy finished four years ago. Mostly this has been a really shitty thing, because Oh is phenomenally talented. But if there has been one small silver lining, it is this: Oh’s Yang was everything (EVERYTHING), so it would have been devastating to see Oh’s deadpan humour and peculiarly glacial passions wasted on an unworthy project or role. Well, we should all consider ourselves extremely blessed because three episodes in, Killing Eve – the hotly anticipated spy-versus-assassin show that premiered on BBC America on Sunday April 8 – has already surpassed sky-high expectations. In fact it was renewed for a second season before the first episode even aired.

Killing Eve is high-calibre drama, but it’s also consummately cool. Moreover the show seems to have arrived, pitch-perfect, at just the right cultural moment. A comparatively fem-centric cast and crew established a firm feminist foundation: Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote the first two episodes (adapted from novellas by Luke Jennings), and the narrative revolves around two women, Sandra Oh as spy Eve Polastri and Jodie Comer as assassin Villanelle. Kirby Howell-Baptiste, who can also be seen right now on HBO’s Barry, does quite a lot with a small role; and Fiona Shaw shines as the quietly hilarious Carolyn Martens, head of the Russian desk at MI6.

Shaw’s comic chemistry with Oh is really remarkable; some of their scenes together have a bona fide screwball quality. Carolyn’s sly, self-satisfied smile as she rather dismissively tells Eve that she’s been married a “few times” is as strangely affecting as it is amusing, and Martens also delivers the absolute funniest line of the show so far, as she and Eve approach the squalid apartment building in which the assassin-hunting secret headquarters are housed: “I once saw a rat drink from a can of Coke there. Both hands. Extraordinary.”

The dialogue is outstanding, but honestly Killing Eve overachieves in nearly every way; I would be remiss not to also mention the glorious art direction and cinematography, as well as the superb soundtrack. I was especially impressed by how seamlessly the show synthesizes different subgenres, creating something at once recognizable yet deliciously new. In the first two episodes it’s like the unabashed fascination with serial killers in Mindhunter has met the feminist fury of The Fall and been self-reflexively repackaged with the sort of classic Hollywood glamour seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 crime caper To Catch a Thief. By the third episode we shift gears a bit and get more than a whiff of classic kinky Berlin; “deviant” and diverse sexualities are very much on the table. Although somewhat unexpected, the transition works very well and further confirms that Killing Eve is politically on point – and in just about the least boring way imaginable.

Surely one of the most familiar, and most pervasively masculinized, dynamics in entertainment history is the relationship between a law-enforcement officer and a criminal who track one another obsessively, even lovingly. In Killing Eve we finally get to see this trope transformed into something refreshingly “feminine” – and by feminine I mean ambitious, clever, sexy, and witty. Amongst other things this show promises to be a real boon for chic, smart women who, like Eve, are bored – bored of their bosses and of being too smart for their jobs, bored of endless third winter (the Tuscany scenes are so lush, folks), bored of being chronically underestimated by men and understimulated by hegemonically heterosexual, masculine television, bored of “nice guys,” JUST SO DAMN BORED. Yes, I’m projecting here – but also, I’m right. Now go watch it and see for yourself.