The now-fatherless son goes to take a seat in a nearby chair, perhaps to avoid falling to his knees in grief. Instead of displaying any of the emotions such news generally elicits, however, the seemingly dazed Melrose notices something on the floor and goes to pick it up. It’s a used needle, and when he stands again, the camera reveals a small spot of blood on the elbow of his shirt, where he had pricked himself for a high moments earlier. Melrose is not affected by his father’s death, nor anything else for that matter. It’s simply the heroin kicking in. Along with the performances by Cumberbatch and the other actors, including Hugo Weaving as Patrick’s tyrannical father David and Jennifer Jason Leigh as his oft-absent mother Eleanor, Nicholls and Berger also craft a darkly comic story relying just as much on visuals as language. Of course, Cumberbatch’s Melrose shines brightly even when he’s talking to himself (as he does throughout Bad News), but he also rises to the occasion (despite, or because of, his high) when he stumbles into the wrong parlor at a mortuary. Weaving does the same as David, whose mere look strikes the fear of God into a maid at the family’s French villa in the flashback-heavy second episode, Never Mind. His words speak just as loudly, as when he picks up a younger Patrick (Sebastian Maltz) by the ears and snarls in his face. And so it goes with Leigh’s Eleanor, the mother Patrick so desperately needed, but who instead absconds with high society friends like Anne Moore (Indira Varma) or by herself, just so she can avoid David’s wrath. It’s also a story that takes time. St Aubryn took five separate novels and many years to lay out Patrick’s tale of redemption. Showtime’s co-production with Sky takes far less time, but as previously stated above, the showrunners successfully work in the necessary pace across all five episodes. The details of David’s abuse of young Patrick, the latter’s rampant drug use before and after the former’s death, then rehab and reintegration into the “real world” (as opposed to the Melrose family’s high society life) — all of this takes time to tell. As a result, it requires a great deal of patience from the audience, while also bombarding them with tragedy. If you’re willing to forgo Cumberbatch’s otherwise insanely popular personages as Marvel’s Doctor Strange or the BBC’s Sherlock, riding along instead for something more akin to his work in The Imitation Game or Hamlet, then you will be greatly rewarded. Patrick Melrose is an excellent study of maligned characters and the unjust world they inhabit. Many of the fine folks involved in its making will surely be nominated for various industry prizes in the coming year. So you might as well get ahead of the curve and give it a go. Besides, did I mention that Cumberbatch wears an eyepatch at one point?
