Today, we look at how Killing Eve showed how special its story and its lead characters were right from the start.
This is a delayed Year of Great TV Episodes, where every day from March 2nd on this year (plus January 1st-March 1st of 2024), we’ll take a look at great TV episodes. Note that I’m not talking about “Very Special Episodes” or episodes built around gimmicks, but just “normal” episodes of TV shows that are notable only because of how good they are.
All this month, I’ll be spotlighting great female-centric TV episodes.
In the opening scene of the first episode of Killing Eve, a young woman is eating ice cream in a cafe in Vienna. There is a little girl at table nearby with her mother, also eating ice cream. The little girl smiles at the young woman, and the young woman doesn’t seem to know how to react. Then she sees a nearby worker. The worker smiles at the little girl, and the little girl smiles back at him. The young woman copies the worker’s smile, and the little girl returns the smile. What we APPEAR to have here is a young woman who doesn’t know how to relate to other people. She gets up, puts some of her change into the tip chair, walks by the little girl…and flips the little girl’s ice cream on to the little girl. The young woman exits the cafe, smiling to herself.
THAT is how we were introduced to the psychopathic killer Villanelle (Jodie Comer), and it’s one of the best introductions to a lead character that you’ll ever see. Phoebe Waller-Bridge has already been spotlighted this month for her brilliant work on the comedy series, Fleabag, and yet, while working on Fleabag, she ALSO created this brilliant spy thriller series. It’s really remarkable just HOW good Waller-Bridge is.
We then meet Eve (Sandra Oh), an MI5 worker who deals with diplomatic security for people while in London. She is hungover from celebrating her manager’s birthday the previous night. She is called into a meeting on Saturday, where she has to set up security for a foreign witness whose boyfriend was murdered in front of her (his femoral artery was sliced, and he bled to death in the street). Eve instantly theorizes that the killer is a woman (since the victim was a trafficker who wouldn’t have noticed a woman as a threat).
She learns that CCTV footage says it was a man, but she doesn’t believe it. She breaks protocol to interview the witness, and she uses a student of her husband’s to translate the Polish witnesses’ statement to see that her boyfriend WAS killed by a woman.
Meanwhile, we see Villanelle kill a mob boss, using the man’s grandson to lure him into a trap. Before she kills him, she asks who made his bed sheets. She is told by her handler that she left a witness alive, so she has to go take care of the witness.
Eve decides to visit the witness again, and meets Villanelle in the bathroom of the hospital, with Villanelle disguised as a nurse. Villanelle tells her to wear her hair up. Eve then goes to the bathroom, and gets a call from her manager, who tells her that she’s right, the CCTV footage was bullshit. He tells her to make sure the witness is safe. She returns to the room, though, to see that the witness, the nurse, and two security guards have all been killed (even though Villanelle’s handler told her to make it look like a suicide).
Eve and her manager are fired, but Carolyn (Fiona Shaw), the MI6 head of the Russian desk, is impressed that Eve figured out that the killer is a woman, and comes to her on the side to tell her that she is starting a task force to hunt the woman down (they were trying to dissuade Eve’s investigation), and she wants Eve and her fired manager, Bill, on it.
The episode ends with Villanelle putting on her new bed sheets, by the same designer the mob boss told her before she murdered him.
This was a tight, really well scripted opening episode, and Oh and Comer were both outstanding. Eve is very smart, but her manager/friend, Bill, nails when he notes that really she is mostly just bored with her sweet, but bland, husband, and her bland life.
Villanelle obviously throws a whole new wrinkle into all of this.
Waller-Bridge only wrote the first season, which is a shame, as I think this series could have been legendary if she had done more seasons. Emerald Fennell did the second season, which was still good (not AS good), but then SHE left, too, and the series sort of limped to the finish line, with a finale that pissed everyone off.
Okay, if I’m going to have 292 more of these, I could use suggestions, so feel free to email me at brian@poprefs.com!
The discussion of the opening episodes shows how performance and structure work together. A focused publishing workflow can keep that kind of analysis detailed without becoming hard to scan.