In “Quiz,” a sprightly three-part British drama coming to AMC on Sunday, form closely follows content. The series is based on a quiz-show scandal that mesmerized Britain in the early 2000s, and it takes the form of a question: Do you think they did it?
Directed by Stephen Frears and written by James Graham, based on his play of the same name, “Quiz” dramatizes the events surrounding the September 2001 appearance of an army officer named Charles Ingram on the original, British “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” a national sensation then beginning its fourth year. Ingram went all the way, becoming for a brief moment the third person to win the show’s million-pound top prize. But he and his wife, Diana, were accused, along with another contestant, of having cheated — through the deployment of strategically timed coughs — and were convicted of “deception” and given suspended sentences.
The first episode is devoted to the creation of “Millionaire,” and it’s a stimulating dose of inside baseball. David Liddiment (Risteard Cooper), the new programming director at the ITV network, bemoans the BBC’s superior ability to create “event television.” (His example, the funeral of Princess Diana, establishes the series’s fondly mocking view of its own medium.) A pair of producers, David Briggs (Elliot Levey) and Paul Smith (Mark Bonnar), pitch a show called “Cash Mountain” with an unprecedented payout and a format that produces excruciating pressure; after some tweaks and a name change, ITV has a monster hit.
At the same time, “Quiz” sketches in a British affinity for demonstrating superior knowledge in public, particularly at pubs — the country’s two loves are drinking and being right, Smith says — and introduces the dull but friendly Charles (Matthew Macfadyen), as well as Diana (Sian Clifford) and her brother, Adrian Pollock (Trystan Gravelle), both tightly wound quiz hounds.
In a series of quick, deft scenes, we see Diana and Adrian’s instant obsession with “Millionaire” and the lengths to which they will go to make it on the show, including reaching out to a shadowy underground of gamers who, for a cut, provide assistance that’s legal but not exactly sporting. When Charles eventually gains a slot, it’s because Diana, ineligible to appear a second time, has put his name in without telling him.
This is all preparation for the main acts. “Quiz” is framed throughout by the Ingrams’ trial, and the second and third episodes subtly take on the shape of that proceeding. Episode 2, which re-enacts Charles’s victorious appearance and the growing suspicions of the “Millionaire” staff, is the prosecution’s case: We the jury are shown his dodgy behavior — a repeated pattern of announcing his first guess, then reciting all four choices before settling on his final answer — and we hear the coughs from the studio audience that would be at the heart of the case against him. Episode 3, recounting the trial and its dreary aftermath, is the defense, as the Ingrams’ lawyer (Helen McCrory) casts doubt on each aspect of the state’s entirely circumstantial case.
All of this is handled, by the estimable Frears (“A Very English Scandal”), with a sure hand and a light wit; it’s consistently entertaining. The really distinctive feature of the show, though, is the sleight of hand he and Graham employ to keep open the question of the Ingrams’ guilt. Conversations cut off at ambiguous places; significant glances might signal complicity or shared bewilderment. The couple’s lawyer argues that the “Millionaire” producers are able to build an unassailable narrative because they control the evidence; “Quiz” uses similar techniques to opposite effect, arguing that it’s impossible to be sure of what happened.
At times the show plays with our desire for an answer. A flashback that seems to offer us proof that Charles is lying is revealed to be part of his own testimony in court, in which he then offers an explanation for the apparent contradiction. Guilt and innocence slide around each other from one moment to the next.
Charles, a major in the Royal Engineers, is both puffed up and eager to please, and Macfadyen uses his jutting jaw and a lurking terror in his eyes to convey Charles’s ambient passive aggression, the elaborate way in which he has accommodated himself to being dominated by his bulldog wife. It’s a quieter, more pleasant variation on the sycophant he plays in “Succession.” In a similar vein, Clifford’s Diana has a toned-down version of the neurotic intensity of her character in “Fleabag.”
Both are good, as is McCrory as the tenacious lawyer. But the show’s most memorable performance is given by Michael Sheen as the “Millionaire” host, Chris Tarrant. Without a trace of condescension, Sheen nails a certain kind of utilitarian charisma; his jaunty reading of the witness instructions when Tarrant is called to testify is a throwaway tour de force.
If these performances are more diverting than memorable, it’s probably because “Quiz” itself isn’t as substantial as you might hope, given the big themes it dabbles in. It skates along nimbly on the surface of its mystery and its light social satire — Charles and Diana may have royal-sounding names, but they are, a prosecutor points out, “middle class, middle-aged, middle England” — and is content to stay there. In contrast to much of the current TV and streaming landscape, it makes you wish there were more of it — its three 45-minute episodes (not including commercials) feel too slight.
That “Quiz” avoids going too deep may make sense, though, if you consider that its real theme is the TV business’s ability to profit from pain. The Ingrams’ lives were ruined, but they brought a landslide of publicity to “Millionaire” and ITV, and the network exploited the scandal further in two highly rated documentaries. And last month, “Quiz” was a big hit in Britain — on ITV.
If the question is who was always going to make the real money, you don’t need to phone a friend for the answer.
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