27-02-2025
Small Town, Big Story, review: Chris O'Dowd's new ‘Oirish' dramedy wastes a stellar cast
Father Ted meets The X-Files isn't the worst elevator pitch in the history of television. Sadly, whatever promise the idea holds is squandered in Chris O'Dowd dramedy Small Town, Big Story (Sky Max).
O'Dowd wrote the script for the six-part series 'in the pits of lockdown'. True to its origins, the show – in which Christina Hendricks plays a Hollywood producer returning home to the small Irish town where she grew up – has a cabin-fever quality and tries to cram in too many ideas.
It begins with a flashback to the eve of the new millennium, where young lovers Wendy and Séamus are in a state of drug-induced euphoria when aliens seemingly interrupt their late-night tryst in the woodlands of County Fermanagh. Are the visitors real – or a vision induced by an excess of recreational pharmaceuticals?
The question is left to hang as we fast-forward to the present day. Wendy (Hendricks) is coming back to fictional Drumbán with a view to shooting a Game of Thrones-style Celtic saga. Séamus (a woebegone Paddy Considine) has never left and is now a local GP in the throes of a midlife malaise.
O'Dowd, who co-directed and stars as a Hollywood screenwriter, was inspired by his experience of bringing a big-time television production to his home town of Boyle, Co Roscommon, for his Sky comedy, Moone Boy. But he fails to replicate Moone Boy's deftness. If anything, the portrayal of small-town Ireland veers worryingly close at times to a Martin McDonagh-style unhinged Blarney-fest.
The saving grace is the chemistry between Hendricks (wisely avoiding an Irish accent) and Considine as old flames reunited. Considine is especially impressive, bringing an aching pathos to a clichéd part of a middle-aged man whose life is falling around him (his wheelchair-bound wife, played by Eileen Walsh, is having an affair).
But his and Hendricks's hard work runs aground on a screenplay that can't make up its mind how Oirish it wants to be and which then crowbars in a flying saucer mystery with all the subtlety of Father Ted's Jack Hackett downing a bottle of poitín.
