A tale of two cities Ny-LON Tuesday, 10pm, Channel 4
This show must go on
The main activity in NY-LON, a Channel 4 drama which hopes to become this year's autumn fashion, is clicking. Not only is it about two people who meet by chance and feel something turn over inside them, but clocks keep showing us the time in New York and London. And whenever the title of the series appears on screen, it rotates, like the destinations on an airport departure board.
The reason for this is that NY-LON is aviation shorthand for flights from Manhattan to the British capital. As the seven-part drama series begins, Edie (Rashida Jones) has just flown this route for a holiday. When her bag is nicked beside the Thames, she's helped by Mike (Stephen Moyer), a banker who lends her cash and seems, like her, to hear a click.
Although belonging to the genre of romantic comedy, NY-LON has most in common with Spooks and 24 in that it sees surface as a virtue and psychology as optional.
Getting the characters to episode two requires at least three coincidences so huge - including repeated chance encounters which would only be possible if London were a three-house village - that you become distracted by the false possibility that the drama has a supernatural element.
There is, in fact, an element of time-travel, though this is presentational rather than scientific. The major scenes are played out backwards. Something stunning happens to Mike and Edie as the establishing caption shows, say, 19:00 in London, 14:00 in New York. The clocks then whirr into reverse and we view the incidents that led to this impasse.
In 24, the obsessive chronology was crucial to the plot: time was running out. In NY-LON, the device is no more integral than a twist of lemon in a drink - we are shown both times even when Mike and Edie are in the same city - but this is typical of a drama more concerned with showing than knowing. Mike, inevitably, lives in a loft within a converted church; though Edie is supposed to be a poverty-stricken teacher, she can run to glam clothes and frequent flights to London.
Perhaps the reason for the attention given to settings and structure is the production's awareness of how little is going on underneath. The plot, stripped down, is: boy meets girl but it's hard for them to see each other.
Even 400 years ago, when Shakespeare pitched that script to the Globe, the money men encouraged him to include some stuff about confusing potions and a blood-feud between the two families. The scriptwriter Simon Burke, however, gambles on holding the audience through almost two months with much more conventional obstacles: geographical separation and ex-partners relighting the flame.
One of the major themes of Burke's script is transatlantic differences and, as the single credited writer, he has benefited from one distinction. You suspect that, in the US, dozens of writing teams would have been brought in until the conversation between Michael and Edie consisted entirely of sassy gags. Burke provides some but also stoops to an exchange in which Edie belittles Mike's job by saying "You sell shares", to which he replies: "I sell dreams."
Keith Boak's direction is also an exercise in fantasy-management. Both cities look their best: Woody Allen's New York, Richard Curtis's London. The key plot-device in episode one is an earring dropped by Edie. The invocation of fairytale could only have been clearer if her slip-up been a slipper.
Possibly nervous of its central soppiness, the drama occasionally drops a little blight among the roses - City sackings, a heroin overdose - but it's a high-concept rom-com at heart. And, though trying to resist, I felt something click.
Mediaguardian
me too
