Waiting for the Out
11 January 2026 04:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI took a look at the new Saturday night drama on BBC1, "Waiting for the Out", and was immediately drawn in; apparently it was actually the second episode, but to be honest I don't think I'd have guessed that! Maybe I'm too accustomed to the in medias res convention of story-telling -- at any rate it was pretty clear that our unnamed (since he has nobody to talk to in the opening scenes) protagonist was having an obsessive-compulsive episode in terms of switching off his gas stove, and then that, ironically, he works in a prison trying to teach the inmates to deal with their internal demons. And then he has to rush off to meet someone who turns out to be his much-older brother, and in the process we learn about their shared past and the way his brother has recently turned his life around... and it all emerges organically as a consequence of the ongoing action, so you've got the present-time story, which is dramatic and emotionally engaging (trying to save lives) and then these snippets of the past being filled in in parallel.
I hadn't realised that this was another 'prison drama', after the also excellent "Screw", about women prison officers -- I wonder if it was filmed using the same decommissioned prison, as the setting looked very familiar! The story-telling was nicely done, but above all it quickly made me care about the characters, which is where the last few TV shows that I looked at failed from the offset. (King and Conqueror did engage me with the characters, but all too often I was struggling to really swallow the depiction of them...)
Also, apparently Marie Antoinette, for which I have been waiting forever with decreasing expectations, *did* eventually get a second season three years later, but it slipped out back in May so quietly that I completely missed it :-(
I hadn't realised that this was another 'prison drama', after the also excellent "Screw", about women prison officers -- I wonder if it was filmed using the same decommissioned prison, as the setting looked very familiar! The story-telling was nicely done, but above all it quickly made me care about the characters, which is where the last few TV shows that I looked at failed from the offset. (King and Conqueror did engage me with the characters, but all too often I was struggling to really swallow the depiction of them...)
Also, apparently Marie Antoinette, for which I have been waiting forever with decreasing expectations, *did* eventually get a second season three years later, but it slipped out back in May so quietly that I completely missed it :-(