Hugo Blick writes and directs every hour of his series himself, and it shows: long, level frames, sudden violence, people who talk in paragraphs. In The Honourable Woman the patience pays off; in The English the plot multiplies until we were keeping a list.
Fi1m perspective
Nobody in a Hugo Blick series just says yes. They say something that could be printed on a card, in a level voice, placed dead centre in a doorway, and the camera holds on them a beat longer than most television would dare. Blick writes, directs and produces his series himself, and the habit runs through all of them. In The Honourable Woman (2014) the dialogue often sounds as if it was written to be quoted afterwards; in The English (2022) men about to be shot pause to deliver a line. Some of these land. Some made us wish somebody would simply say what they knew.
He came to it by an odd road. Blick began as an actor in the late 1980s, with a small part in Tim Burton's Batman (1989), then moved into television comedy, co-creating Marion and Geoff (2000) with Rob Brydon. From 2011 he changed scale: The Shadow Line (2011), a stylised conspiracy thriller, then The Honourable Woman, Black Earth Rising (2018) and The English, each a self-contained series he wrote and directed himself, each about someone whose past comes back to remake them. He has said he is interested in "people in extremis", and that the usual expression of it is obsession. That is the catalogue in a sentence.
What works is the patience, and the violence it pays for. In The Honourable Woman, Zac Nicholson and George Steel shoot long, level frames and Jason Krasucki's cutting lets each scene finish before the next begins, so when something happens it lands. We were horrified by the first five minutes, in which a man is murdered at a restaurant table in front of his two small children and Blick does not cut away from the children; that scene explains the next eight hours of a woman sleeping in a vault. In The English, Arnau Valls Colomer's wide flat horizons do the same job for the plains. Blick also gets actors to keep still and trust him: Maggie Gyllenhaal and Stephen Rea in the one, Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer in the other, and Ciarán Hinds and Toby Jones, given an episode each and better company than most of the people who replace them.
What does not work is the plotting. Both series begin as a straight line and double back through flashback and subplot until we were keeping a list. The Honourable Woman asks us to accept that a great many powerful people have spent years arranging events around one woman's private life, and it earns that only when it stops being a puzzle and becomes about a person; that turn moved us more than the puzzle did. The English has a sheriff, a rancher, homesteaders and soldiers to introduce before its leads have got anywhere near them. It all connects. It takes too long doing it.
He is filming a new series, California Avenue. We hope it has two people at its centre, a camera that holds on them, and somewhere around the third hour the nerve not to explain itself.
Biography
Hugo Blick is a British writer, director, producer and actor. He created, wrote, directed and produced the 2014 BBC and SundanceTV miniseries The Honourable Woman.
Blick trained at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. His early screen work includes a role as a young Jack Napier in Tim Burton's Batman (1989). He is known for the series The Shadow Line (2011), Black Earth Rising (2018) and The English (2022), on all of which he has served as writer, director and producer. He runs his own production company, Eight Rooks.
