Jimmy McGovern is one of the great British TV writers. His work on shows like BROKEN, CRACKER or TIME and in films like THE PRIEST, HILLSBOROUGH or ANTHONY is filled with complex, unexpected characters usually confronting both terrible hardship and moments of tremendous beauty.
I happen to be working on a profile of McGovern right now, and so I've been watching a lot of his work. And although I realize some of it won't be known so well here in the States I'm going to write about him this week, because he really is so good.
One of the things McGovern likes to do is anthology series--he's got one show focused on the stories happening on a single road (known as THE STREET); another about people accused of crimes that focuses not on the case but on the journey of their lives up to their trial -- ACCUSED. Even BROKEN, his powerful six part series about a priest in Liverpool, ends up also being a sort of anthology series about a set of characters in the parish.
In ACCUSED 201, McGovern and co-writer Shaun Duggan tell the story of Tracie, a transvestite who falls in love with a man, Tony, who claims to be a widower. Sean Bean plays Tracie, and while some of the thinking around what it means to be trans is out of date at this point--such as the fact of having a straight man play a trans character--Bean's performance is tender and vulnerable. He won an International Emmy for it.
There's a scene late in the episode, after Tracie has found out that in fact Tony's wife Karen is still alive and working as a sort of beauty consultant, where Tracie makes an appointment and has a conversation with Karen.
It's a scene that we've all seen before--the wife or mistress snooping on the other woman. It also has a lot in common with MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING, in that the "other woman"--Karen--is just a total sweetheart, much like Cameron Diaz's character in that film.
But there's something about the scene that's absolutely unique. Even as Karen is in a sense everything that Tracie might be afraid of, a la MY BEST FRIEND, there's none of that movie's sense of the character mostly being there in order to affect Tracie, or being over the top in her sweetness.
I've been trying to parse how McGovern & Duggan accomplish that. Here's the episode; the scene starts at 27:00. See what stands out for you.
For me, I think the key is that McGovern & Duggan give Karen a kind of Save the Cat moment. Presented with a transgender patron, she neither runs away nor ignores that fact. She treats her like any other customer, which means acknowledging who Tracie is -- talking about what's best for her skin, admiring her cheekbones and asking about her life.
She's the only character in the entire episode that actually expresses interest in Tracie as a person, who wants to know her story.
Tracie is of course checking Karen out, comparing herself, pumping her for information, even giving a little hint that she knows Tony. But that dynamic is not able to take over in the way it normally does in these kinds of stories. There's too much goodwill that's been built at the beginning, and that recurs at the end, with Karen really feeling for Tracie upon hearing the man she's seeing is married and said his wife is dead. Once again, she's the only person in the episode who treats Tracie as a friend.
This is just one scene, right in the middle of the episode, and in a way it proves to be off track from the plot. Tracie doesn't do anything as a result of what she's learned, and while Tony gets freaked out it's not this moment that alerts Karen to anything happening but her seeing Tracie's name on his phone.
And yet for me it's the high point of the ep, I think precisely because it resists the conventions in favor of giving us a human moment.
When you're writing that scene that seems so familiar, so conventional, maybe take a minute to stop and ask yourself, Is there another approach to this scene that I haven't seen before? What's the most interesting way forward?
