The Couple Next Door Elevates What Should Be The Plot For a Straight to Video Film Into Something Better

(Not That I’ve Ever Watched Such Movies, Of Course)

I have to hand it to the Brits. The basic setup of The Couple Next Door, currently airing on Starz, is pretty much the setup of show much of the soft core kind of programming one got from Showtime and Cinemax from the 1990s until roughly 2010. It tells the story of a long time married couple, moving into a suburban community in England, being welcomed the most warmly by another long-time married couple and within the first half-hour we know one of the couples are in an open marriage (they use the more refined term ‘non-monogamous relationship, of course, but the wife is in lingerie in the opening episode welcoming another couple in). Eventually as the two couples bond, the new one learns about the old ones relationship and eventually they become inviting into it. This is a scenario that never ends well in most films or shows about the subject (even the openly erotic ones) and indeed in the teaser to the series we hear a gunshot with both couples running from a cabin so we know this will end badly. I’ve seen my share of stories like this, most of them in direct-to-video movies and I have a feeling with the best actors from American television this story would just be trash.

But that’s the thing about the British. They have this ability which can’t truly be explained to elevate with their writing, acting and — let’s not kid ourselves — those accents to often make the most lowbrow material more than it should be. I do get this very clear impression from the first two episodes of The Couple Next Door. No one’s ever going to mistake this for The Crown or Slow Horses but there’s something invariably watchable about it that several times see a series that manages to elevate it slightly about the level of what should be prurient material.

The couple who moves in are Evie (Eleanor Tomlinson) and Pete (Alfred Enoch). At the time of the series premiere Evie is pregnant and there’s clearly some tension there. We will learn the child was the product of IVF and that Pete in particular has had motility issues. Both Pete and Evie are working professionals: Pete is a journalist in a local paper that is on the verge of bankruptcy, Evie a grade-school teacher. Early in the first episode, tragedy unfolds when we learn Evie has miscarried and can’t reach Pete on the job. Evie ends up turning to her neighbors who we met in the first episode: Becka (Jessica De Gouw) and Danny (Sam Heughan) for comfort.

An interim goes by when both are understandably emotionally wrecked. During this same period Evie goes to meet her very religious family, led by a patriarch who is a perfect bastard. He’s made it clear he thought that the IVF was an offense to natural order and there seems to be this understanding that he doesn’t think much of his daughter marrying a black man. He also seems to be the kind of bully who holds everyone under his thumb and Evie’s sister is clearly terrified when Evie rebels at a family function. Pete and Evie have been together since they were in university and each is the only person the other has been with.

Danny is a local motorcycle cop who works primarily doing security at a hospital. He’s clearly dealing with a shortage of money for reasons we’re still not clear on but has something to do with his past. He agrees to moonlight with a colleague ‘doing security’ above something that is clearly involving something criminal and may very well be connected with the kind of illegal activity that Pete is investigating for his paper. In the second episode we see just how dangerous this gets as gunfire explodes and the truck is robbed.

Becka is a yoga instructor and has a very popular women’s group. In the opening it has one male member — Alan, a man who couldn’t be more clearly a pervert even before we see him at a telescope overlooking their house. He is the basic cliché of the dirty old man and Couple barely makes an effort to humanize him: he’s married, his wife can’t go upstairs and he’s been delaying buying her a stairlift so he can keep spying on the hot woman next door. This is a leaden story that I hope pays off because Hugh Dennis, who plays him, is so heavy handing you expect him to be wearing a dirty raincoat every time he goes to his computer.

The more intriguing part of Couple — the one that elevates it more above the kind of soft-core that it should be — is that in both couples, the female is the more dominant figure. Becka came from an unconventional family and in every discussion that happens about the couple swapping, she is the alpha and Danny hangs back. In the second episode Becka makes it clear that she wants to have Evie and Pete become their new friends. Danny is troubled by this: there are rules in place and the clearest ones are that they only do this with strangers. We already know by this point that Evie is clearly attracted to Danny and that it’s also bothering Pete. But Becca makes it very clear that she finds this more amusing than problematic to the point she will eventually say ‘f — -the rules.” Fans of Heughan from Outlander (the Starz series that made him an international sensation) might either be amused or unsettled to see that sweeping Scottish rogue so under his wife’s thumb.

The same is equally true in Evie and Pete. Evie clearly comes from a household of repression and the last several years have taken things out of her. But it’s clear very quickly that Danny’s presence arouses something in her that she barely bothers to hide. Pete isn’t troubled by this initially; he’s glad to see his wife happy — and sexually aggressive, one should appear. And the series makes it clear he knows about what his neighbors are doing before they reveal it. But while he considers himself open-minded Evie’s clear attraction to Danny unsettles him and not even the idea of sleeping with the gorgeous Becka is enough to stir him.

I have to say on a separate level Enoch is for me the draw of this show. I was curious to see if, as with Aja Naomi King in Lessons in Chemistry, whether he was a good actor or his appeal was based solely on his work in Shondaland. And in a series with a completely different kind of sexual dynamic than How To Get Away With Murder Enoch shows a capability with this material that I didn’t think possible. There’s also something promising about him being, at least at the start of the show, the one character with a moral compass both at work and home.

Now I won’t pretend for a moment than Couple Next Door is at anywhere near the level of so much of the brilliant drama I’ve seen on Starz in the past year. It isn’t anywhere near the caliber of Three Women (which dealt with a similar storyline) or Sweetpea. And frankly I’m not sure what I think about the fact that its been renewed for a second season already or if I’ll even like it at the end of the first. But watching this kind of drama and seeing it neither go immediately towards exploitation and actually be willing to explore the moral dilemmas in it, I have to at least give it marks for effort. Everyone on the show, being from Britain, is familiar with Samuel Johnson and his remarks about a dog walking on its hind legs: “It is not done well, but one is surprised to see it done it all.” The Couple Next Door takes a subject that not even cable would have tackled a few years ago and tries to do it in a way that is more ambitious than the kind of thing I (I mean, of course, other viewers) saw Cinemax do so many times for the purpose of exploitation. And it is doesn’t done well, but it isn’t done badly. It may end up playing out like a Lifetime movie but it seems to be trying harder. Maybe it is the accent.

My score: 3. 25 stars.