Series 5 of Inside No. 9 feels like something of a mixed bag, even with an excellent Maxine Peake to hand
“You’re twisting my melon”
It feels counter-intuitive to even suggest that a series of Inside No. 9 wasn’t what you were expecting it to be but here we are, that’s how I felt about Series 5 and the first half of it in particular. From referee’s changing rooms to haunted flats to a family’s troubled Advent season, it feels like we’re on a stranger trajectory than usual, different dramatic terrain which doesn’t quite sit with what we’ve come to expect from creators/writers Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith.
Maybe that’s their intent, the game of wrong-footing us so key to their intention with Inside…. As we flirt with gay footballers and accusations of matchfixing, adult babysitting and viciously overbearing mothers, and dreams of prom dresses and violent loansharks, the vibe just hits from an oblique angle. For want of a better explanation, these three episodes were all a bit weird rather than engrossingly fascinating as I’ve come to expect from this show.
It is an issue exacerbated a distinct rise in quality for the final three episodes of the series, at least two of which are some of the best yet. Misdirection dips into the world of cut-throat illusionists and fiendishly clever plotting; finale The Stakeout takes a previously unexplored route into trad horror to liven up its police procedural beginnings; and Thinking Out Loud brilliantly weaves together its disparate threads to conjure up something pleasingly complex yet emotionally affecting.
Intriguingly, there does seem to be a bit of a dropoff in terms of the big-name casting in this series and I wonder if that has an effect, much as I would like to argue that it doesn’t. Maxine Peake is the sole big-ticket name (or so I would wager) and she absolutely knocks it out of the park but few other actors are really given as meaty material – Jenna Coleman and Fionn Whitehead do well but are too limited, Kadiff Kirwan, Phil Davis and Jill Halfpenny reduced to cameos. David Morrissey’s ref a rare exception with his wryly observed work.
