Despite a starry cast, ITV drama Playing Nice is beyond ridiculous rubbish
“We think you left the hospital with another couple’s biological son”
We’re not even a full week into 2025 yet and already ITV have reverted to form when it comes to their TV dramas. Heavily trailed over Christmas, Playing Nice has a starry cast, lovely locations and a humdinger of a premise but most importantly of all, is an absolute schlocky mess. Adapted by Grace Ofori-Attah from JP Delaney’s novel of the same name, it leaps over being so bad it is good to just being plain bad.
Maddie and Pete seem to have the family dream nailed down in Cornwall. She’s a chef-owner of a seaside restaurant and he’s a journalist turned stay-at-home dad to three-year-old Theo but when a hospital phone call calls them in to be told that circumstances have revealed two premature babies got mixed up in their neonatal intensive care unit way back when and consequently, Theo isn’t theirs.
Reeling from this news, a knock at their door brings Miles into their life, the biological father of Theo and the current father of David. He’s soon inviting them over to his designer home with wife Lucy and convincing Maddie and Pete to sue the hospital whilst an informal agreement is made for each couple to keep the child they’ve raised but become a presence in their birth sons’ lives. What could possibly go wrong?
Well James McArdle’s Miles is a sociopath and the intimation is that Jessica Brown Findlay’s near-silent Lucy is under some kind of coercive control. And whilst James Norton’s Pete is an entirely open book about the difficulties his family has faced after Theo’s premature birth, including Maddie’s post-natal depression sensitively portrayed by Niamh Algar, Miles is quick to manipulate any and every piece of information to try and gain custody of both boys.
From this horribly fascinating premise, Playing Nice quickly degenerates into sheer ridiculousness as it over-relies on multiple contrivances and over-egged coincidences to draw everyone ever closer and it asks us to believe in some insane behaviour. Norton’s Pete is clearly meant to be the main one playing nice and you can stomach it for an episode but once they’re deep in the weeds, he makes inexplicable decision after inexplicable decision.
Nor is he the only one. The way in which every single professional body kowtows to Miles’ every demand seems scarcely believable, McArdle is highly charismatc but asking us to believe that Pete’s dad would have let him in for an indepth chat whilst the custody battle is raging on is infuriating. And whilst it is good to see Maureen Beattie appear late on in a crucial role, the fact that we don’t get any real sense of underlying motivation for our bearded baddie leaves him fatally one-dimensional.
It’ll be little surprise that the finale is also terrible as it seeks to wind the whole farce up. For all the seriousness of the questions it has raised – and there is something deeply disturbing about the ways in which all this is affecting the kids – the writing shows little interest in interrogating them, relying instead on more ridiculous behaviour and sweeping drone shots of the Cornish coastline. Easily avoidable.
