Sweetpea’s Got A Little List And They’ll None Of Them Be Missed — She Hopes
Ella Purnell Is Hysterical As The Killer Nobody Sees
Ella Purnell has been around for awhile and almost from the moment she played teen Maleficent we know that there’s something dark behind that doll eye stare. It took a while for television to realize in her leading roles in Sweetbitter and Belgravia but the world learned it when she played Jackie, Shauna’s best friend who cheated on her boyfriend with her before they got on the plane that led to a crash. Jackie and Shauna feuded, Jackie got killed but it took awhile before Shauna could accepted that — and then she ended up being the first meal of the survivors.
Purnell has been a superb voice actress, particularly in the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy as well as Arcane but she really came into her own in Fallout when she played the unlikely heroine Lucy exploring a post-apocalyptic world. You wouldn’t think she had time to do anything else in 2024 but this winter she produced the Sky television series Sweetpea, playing the title milquetoast character at the center of it. Just the trailers intrigued me, I’ve since seen the first two episodes on Starz and I’m having the time of my life.
Female serial killers have been part of popular fiction, particularly British fiction over the last decade and quite a few have been the subject of comic novels. But it says something that I don’t remember meeting one in popular culture like Rhiannon. Even though in the teaser of the series she makes a list of ‘people I’d like to kill’ and its pretty clear going forward quite a few of them treat her badly, Rhiannon seems so much part of the background you really can’t imagine her capable of violence. Rhiannon has spent so much of her life treated as if she was invisible or being bullied that I almost wondered if the twist would be she was. Rhiannon had spent her entire life where people have either not listened to her or pretended she wasn’t there that it’s clear not even she believes she’s real. The only person who seems to care about her is her father or her dog and both are dead before the first episode is over.
Rhiannon’s sister has been in Paris for the better part of Rhiannon’s life and only shows up to make a passing appearance at the funeral before she disappears telling Rhiannon she’s selling the house. “Nobody lives there,” she says blandly before talking to Julia (Nicole Lecky). We already know from flashbacks that Julia spent all of Rhiannon’s primary school life bullying her to the point that she pulled her hair out and had to wear a wig — and then pulled off the wig at a school function. It’s telling that the moment Julia reappears in Rhiannon’s life, literally at her dad’s funeral that her entire attitude is to act as though Rhiannon is still beneath her and to pretend nothing ever happened.
Rhiannon’s work life has been worse. Her boss Norman (a wonderful stuffy Jeremy Swift) has been ignoring her all her life, calling her Sweetpea. After her father dies she goes into his office and asks timidly if she can apply to be a junior reporter. Norman basically fobs her off and two minutes later AJ (Calam Lynch) shows up, walks into his office and less then a minute later has been named junior reporter. Rhiannon actually starts following him with hostility in her eyes and then when he turns around he backs off. AJ is clearly a nice person and may be the first person who actually sees Rhiannon rather than treats her as part of the furniture.
That night Rhiannon’s beloved dog dies, she gets pissed both in the English and American sense of the word, buries him goes to the local pub with the intention of telling Julia off. Once again Julia’s mere appearance causes her to flinch and walk away. As she huddles off into the canal, a local man literally urinates on her, gets angry that she was in the way and Rhiannon snaps, stabbing him with her knife a dozen times. When the rage goes away she panics and dumps the body in the water.
The next morning she wakes up with bloody clothes around her and is in a complete and utter panic as well as guilt. Rhiannon is not Dexter or any of the killers around him by any stretch of the imagination; she spends the next several hours frantically cleaning up and when she drives by the canal and sees the police nearby she’s understandably unnerved. However at work when one of the reporters sees the mess she can’t help herself and says it was a murder revealing details that she heard from the police. Naturally Norman sends someone else to investigate and naturally that same reporter repeats the information back and Norman considers it gospel. Rhiannon, however, now wants to know who she kills and its clear this is out of guilt. She ends up going to interview the family of the victim (AJ of course is sent with her instead of alone) and she goes into the flat fundamentally broken up when she hears the loving expressions about their son. Then she goes into the victim’s room and finds a restraining order. She tells AJ they have to follow up and they learn what Rhiannon suspected — the man she killed was a horrible bully who abused his co-worker for months on end and was still ignoring the restraining order. Rhiannon offers sympathy to the man and then tells Norman that this is the bigger story. Reluctantly Norman agrees to publish it but he also tells Rhiannon she did good work — even calling her by her real name.
That night Rhiannon seems more alive — until the cops show up. She goes into the bathroom, understandably guilty — and then she sees graffiti that demonstrates once and for all the awfulness of the man she killed. Then, like kismet, a man she encountered in the hospital the night her father died who was truly awful and then is just so now is placing a drink order — and turns it away. With a sense of purpose she starts to follow him, lures him into a trap and repeats the first act.
I realize I should consider Rhiannon, at the very least, like the antiheroines we’ve increasingly been meeting in the last decade on Peak TV, from Claire Underwood to Annalyse Keating to Villanelle but unlike all of them I actually like Rhiannon and find myself delighted watching everything she does, even when she viciously stabbed people. The comparisons to Dexter will no doubt be made but they’re not remotely fair: Dexter, as I’ve written had something wrong with him from birth, knew he was a monster and was always apart from humanity by choice. Rhiannon, by contrast, is apart from humanity and gets away with her murders because no one takes her seriously and actually has a sense of purpose to her that Dexter never did. Dexter was killing to keep the monster in him at bay, and the fact that the people he killed deserved to die was his excuse to do so. Rhiannon, by contrast, is such a waif and does everything with an amateurishness that Dexter would be astonished she hasn’t gotten caught.
There’s also the fact that while Dexter was a dark drama Sweetpea (based on a series of best-selling novels) is pure comedy and doesn’t even bother to pretend otherwise. It also helps this is a British series (the English, as we all know, do everything better than we do) and so many of the characters with the exception of Rhiannon and AJ, honestly look like they’d be more fitting in a series by Ricky Gervais than David Milch or Vince Gilligan. Nor are these the kind of village locals you might see in Broadchurch or Ted Lasso; they all take the nature of being needlessly cruel or vaguely uninterested in everything. Watching them you get the feeling that if Dexter had committed his crimes in this part of the world no one would have noticed and practically just regarded his behaviors as ‘quirky’.
Rhiannon gets away with her murders mainly because she’s played by Ella Purnell, who is four foot eight, 93 pounds soaking wet (and considering its raining most of the time that’s often) and is essentially using a jackknife to exercise her wrath on the bullies of these world. And while none of the people’s she’s taken out are monsters in the sense Dexter was, they’re all horribly rude and in England that’s practically crying out as a victimless crime. More seriously they’re also all horrible bullies who are either misogynistic or bullies and in a certain sense that’s worse than some of the people Dexter deals with.
Sweetpea is a lot of fun, which is a nice change from the far too dark antiheroes dramas we’ve been getting recently and, because it’s a British series it’s also relatively short — only six episodes. But like the other exceptional British television series Slow Horses that the Emmys and most Americans finally discovered this year, there are already five books in the series and its not closed to finished. The question is, of course, given Purnell’s already packed schedule (Fallout was renewed for a second season) whether, if the series is renewed by Starz, when it would air. I’d love to see who else Rhiannon would like to kill and I think the viewer would too.
My score: 4.25 stars.