There is bad television that thinks it is good and there is bad television that knows it is bad, and this adaptation of Cork author Catherine Ryan Howard’s 56 Days (Amazon Prime Video) is unapologetically in the latter category. Not having encountered the novel, I can’t comment on its quality, but the TV show is a magnificently campy mix of fever dream and preposterous thriller. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever watched, and I loved it.
The book is set in Dublin and tells the story of two apparent strangers who meet in a supermarket at the start of the pandemic. Prime’s retelling removes the lockdown element of the story and, in moving the action to Boston, guts it of any trace of Irishness. How thoroughly? Put it this way: when heroine Ciara introduces herself, she does so as – you might want to cover your ears and scream – “See-ar-a”. Thank goodness, Howard didn’t name her mysterious protagonist Meadbh, or heaven knows what might have ended up on screen.
See-ar-a (Dove Cameron) is new in Boston and eager to make a connection with Oliver (Avan Jogia), a smoothie she bumps into at the local organic market. She’s obsessed with the Nasa space shuttle programme, he wants to take her to a hot new cocktail spot. Each exudes blinding levels of smarm and is clearly up to no good. Surely nothing can go wrong?
But we know that something has gone wrong because all of this is taking place approximately two months – or, if you prefer, 56 Days – ago. In the “present day,” police have broken into an apartment and discovered a body in an advanced state of decomposition. Who is it – and where is the killer?
It’s a shame the producers did not stick with the Dublin setting, which would have made 56 Days a deranged cousin thrice removed to Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Shifted to a generic American city, it has become a wildly hysterical copycat of Netflix’s You – the unhinged potboiler about a sympathetic psychopath that unfolds as a sort of bargain-bin version of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.
That show was wild, and 56 Days is even wilder. Go into it expecting a conventionally well-put-together mystery, and you’ll be underwhelmed. Buckle up for a hysterically soapy thrill ride, and you won’t be going home disappointed.