Generally I am loathe to speak of the shows produced by American studios and those produced in Ireland in the same sentence. Comparing the two will only ever have one outcome, as the gigantic budgets with which American TV is produced (both Game of Thrones and House of Cards spend more on one episode than the budget of the majority of movies made each year) make their product an unreachable comparison for Irish TV.
That being said, I must admit that upon sitting down to watch Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope, I felt my admiration for Lena Dunham grow considerably. Her flagship show Girls, from which RTE2’s new comedy seems to draw so much inspiration, occasionally gets a lot of flack, but when watching Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope, one realises the subtle brilliance involved in her output, namely because Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope lacks brilliance of any kind, subtle or otherwise.
Set in Dublin, filmed with an entirely Irish cast, and with some scenic views of the city, Can’t Cope Won’t Cope would be an enticing premise for any Irish fan. Add onto that that the show had been self-described by the writer as being both “vulnerable and endearing”, I went in hopeful that a new Irish cult hit had been created.
It’s hard to know who to blame more for the mess that played out in front of me on a screen, the writer, Stefanie Preissner, or director, Cathy Brady, but 15 minutes in one can’t help but come to the conclusion that both are noticeably inexperienced and had no idea what to do with this golden chance when it was given to them.
From a directing point of view, this looks at about the standard of transition year students playing around with their mother’s video camera. I am not referring to expensive special effects or lighting, but basic directing techniques that seem to remain as of yet undiscovered by Brady. She places her actors in such a close proximity that a battery hen would blush, and as any scene develops, the actors soon find themselves almost bumping into each other as they try to say the clunky lines. Consistently enough to make it seem like a directorial decision, we cannot see the faces of people talking while they talk. Take the art scene in DIT: one of our lead characters is talking to a male, and Brady has decided we should get a fine zoom up of the male’s back, while the woman (whose name I literally cannot remember, despite having just watched three episodes just two hours ago, so forgetful is this show) just stares blankly. What’s going on here, are they flirting? Does he like her? Does she like him? Are they indifferent to one another? Or perhaps they’re just friends? Who knows? Well, the audience certainly doesn’t, due to bizarre camera positioning.
Fifteen minutes in one can’t help but come to the conclusion that both are noticeably inexperienced and had no idea what to do with this golden chance when it was given to them.
The best example of this directing is provided ten minutes into the first episode, where our young heroine flees a salary review meeting to vomit in a toilet. For a reason that I truly cannot fathom, the director decides to place the camera in the toilet itself, and only pulling it out before a load of red spew coats the screen. Typically, the two major directorial decisions taken when a character vomits is either a shot over the character’s shoulder, so we sympathise with her pain and strife, or sitting in the God’s eye view so we can feel sanctimonious about whatever life decisions have left this character vomiting into a toilet. Brady’s decision to place the camera where she does gives the impression that the audience is being vomited on, something that disturbed the flow of the story even further than the writing.
Preissner describes herself as a writer, whose shows have seen some success on the Irish theatre circuit. Her first TV offering feels like a rough draft or rushed work, as it lacks much of the finesse that experience in the field would bring. There are no jokes throughout, which for a show described as a comedy is somewhat fateful. Even worse, is that I cannot discover any discernible beginning, middle or end in any of the three episodes I watched, no conflict to be overcome, and no character development. I know who the protagonist is only because she’s the one who’s on the screen for the most amount of time.
What’s worst about this script however, and what makes me believe it is a first draft accidently sent instead of deleted, is the sheer lazy lack of research throughout. The show is set in the Irish funds industry, and written by someone who knows even less about funds than the average punter whose only knowledge of the subject comes from The Wolf of Wall Street. As an example, in the first episode, our protagonist is on the phone with an American client. She says hello to him, asks “What type of fund is that?” then taps a button on her computer. The very next second her workmate says “You just put €5 million into that fund!”, and then our protagonist shrugs.
I don’t know much about funds, but somehow I feel that to describe this as a misrepresentation would be somewhere in the ballpark of how little research had done for this script. Stuart Carolan, before writing the scripts for the fifth season of Love/Hate, spent weeks visiting prisons around Ireland speaking to guards and inmates. In an interview, he explained that this was because he “knew nothing about the Irish prison system”. Such a need for research seemingly didn’t occur to Preissner. The Dublin funds industry has 14,000 employees working and living in the city. Surely she could have found at least one willing to explain that the job is a bit more than repeating the words “fund” and “client” several times while wearing office attire. This lazy approach runs through the whole three episode’s writing.
The thing about Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope that depressed me most was the reaction of the media. Every single outfit avoided reviewing outright the programme, and to find an opinion online is difficult. The Journal and the Irish Times interviewed the writer, and RTÉ allowed her to write a blog on what it felt like writing a show. Other papers went with the approach of printing out tweets on the topic. No institution had the gall to actually call the show what it was: an underdeveloped and uninspired work, far below the standard that Irish television viewers have become accustomed to both in Irish and international shows. Perhaps such a quality of TV show could pass in the channels that have numbers in the 300/400s when one reaches for a remote, but for a flagship show of a national station, the expectation is that they will hire a writer who is willing to cough up something better than a first draft of a random collection of anecdotes, and that the director they choose will be able to show some understanding of above and below. Often people act like Love/Hate is some kind of weird flash in the pan that became a cult hit for some unknown reason, as if there’s a pagan God that decides the success of a show. In real life, it was so worth watching because the writing and directing were done by professionals, professionally.
Could you imagine this team doing the research required to create that plot line where Nidge tried to import Lidocaine in a trial run before he brought in heroin? Could you imagine them knowing how to write a scene like the one in Love/Hate season three where Nidge finds himself hopelessly out of his depth in nationalist discourse with members of the IRA, and is made to look like a child among adults? Could you imagine Cathy Brady understanding the jumping between angles that made the assassination of Jon Boy so tense? Would she ever be able to produce the tracking shot from season four of Nidge fleeing his house with his life under threat, and his manic demeanour puts us right into the action and makes us feel hunted?
Until RTÉ hire writers and directors who can answer yes to the above, they’ll be doing us, the audience, a disservice. For now, let’s just hope that Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope will be shelved after its season runs out, and that RTÉ can move on to better things.
