Last modified on Tue 23 Feb 2021 11.08 EST
âYou were the one who said donât get attached, that you keep your feelings in a jar, inside a locked drawer! Your words!â
And yet you think â are they? Are these really anybodyâs words? Has anybody actually ever said such a thing in the annals of human history? And if so, did anybody within hearing keep a straight face and/or stay the hand that could rightfully have felled them for such an utterance in the heat of a pseudo-marital row?
And here, in an inscribed nutshell, we have one of the main problems with David E Kelleyâs drama Big Sky, streaming on Star, the new grownup channel from Disney+. The script is woeful. Woeful. He does this sometimes. For all the precision-tooled efficiency of LA Law (ask your great-grandparents, children. Get them to explain Harry Hamlin while youâre there. He was a rubber man who came to life in Mad Men), the quick distillation of headline issues into plots for Ally McBeal and the shining rigour of Big Little Lies, there is The Practice drowning in its own lather, later Ally McBeal (totally bonkers) and the second series of Big Little Lies (an engine of disappointment). Kelleyâs quality control is unreliable. And sometimes, alas, the result is a series in which people have to partake in exchanges such as: âThe silence scares meâ/âI know what you mean.â