Netflix's Hostage is as hapless as Suranne Jones's prime minister

Telegraph

13 hours ago

At the beginning of five-part mini-series Hostage (Netflix), we are informed, via an intimate exchange with her husband, that prime minister Abigail Dalton went into politics to 'really help people'. Right, I thought, this should make a cracking comedy.
But no, that line was being delivered for real. We were in political-thriller territory rather than satire and no sooner had our Abigail entered No 10 than she was beset by a whirligig of problems kicked off by the abduction of her husband, a doctor with Medecins Sans Frontieres on a mission in French Guiana, by forces unknown.
Few actors can dial up facial anxiety with the eyebrow-dancing agility of Suranne Jones and she gives it the full clock face of crisis. Dalton hurtles from breathless crisis to crisis as she plays cat and mouse with her French counterpart, the glacially cool Vivienne Toussaint (Julie Delpy), who inevitably is nursing an agenda of her own – Abigail's prisoner husband is not top of the list.
So far, so interesting a set up. But scriptwriter Matt Charman throws an overflowing kitchen sink of contemporary issues into Hostage, meaning the focus often gets lost. The demise of the NHS, the underfunding of the British military, the rise of the alt-Right, not forgetting the familiar French predilection for a juicy sex scandal, all battle for elbow room in a story that never comes up for air.