Landscapers: Full Mini Series

December 13, 2021 1:13 AM - Season 1 (Full Season)

Following the true story of seemingly ordinary, devoted and mild-mannered couple Susan and Christopher Edwards, who find themselves the focus of a murder inquiry after they decide to kill one of their parents.
posted by ellieBOA (5 comments total)

On HBO and Sky Atlantic, episode 1 discussion here but all remaining three episodes were released at once so made a full season post.
posted by ellieBOA at 1:13 AM on December 13, 2021

I'd liked this quite a bit. Well acted*, nicely ambiguous and set in Nottingham [this last one might mainly be of interest to me tbf].

I have my usual slight discomfort with true crime, especially fictionalised "true crime". This is ameliorated somewhat by the fact that there doesn't appear to be anybody affected by the crime outside of the suspects - a somewhat poignant note that there wasn't even a photo of Patricia Wycherley for the police to use. The programme very deliberately soft soaps/goes quiet on some of the real life details in order to maintain sympathy for people who (very baldly) murdered an elderly couple and claimed their benefits for 15 years.

But overall - yeah. Good. I had a long conversation afterwards with someone about exactly what we thought it was about (and about the differences between being pathetic, sympathetic and empathetic), which is one more interesting conversation than I have with most people about a TV show.

* Everyone is going to agree this is well acted; while these roles were tailor-made for Olivia Colman and David Thewlis, the result for me was that everything felt a bit too over-familiar. Colman is going to do that thing with her eyes...now. Thewlis is going to do that line reading like...this. Admittedly this is just a result of them being consistently excellent in a lot of good films/shows, but I would have loved it more if I had never seen those two in anything else)
posted by Hartster at 9:03 AM on December 16, 2021

I’m glad I went into this not knowing much about it. I agree, Olivia Colman and David Thewlis were very much…themselves, but then I actually thought that suited the approach to the material, which was deliberately metanarrative. I mean, we see the sets being struck, the camera people behind the scenes wearing COVID PPE, it’s all very “here we go, don’t forget you’re watching a narrative we are creating for you.” I loved the particularly in your face bit when the detectives make Chris and Susan walk through the scene with the actors playing Susan’s parents (“I think Patricia would lie down lightly because of her back problems,” says the actress playing Patricia).

In a way it reminded me of Heavenly Creatures, which also featured fantasy sequences as imagined by two murderers in a sort of folie a deux.

Anyway, I liked it and thought it was well done and a far more interesting approach to a true crime story than the usual.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:29 AM on December 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Oh and also! I meant to say, any ideas on why it’s called Landscapers? At first I thought it was a sort of deadpan reference to the fact that they’d buried the parents in the back yard. But then the male detective says to the female detective that his mum always says in every couple one person is the garden and the other is the garden. I suppose I would say Chris is the gardener and Susan the garden?
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:33 AM on December 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Or that they were one another's gardeners, perhaps? The title is plural, after all.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:20 PM on January 13, 2022 [1 favorite]