Revenge: Series 1 (2011)

Cut from the same aristocratic-gothic cloth as Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars, this camp extravaganza follows Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp) to the Hamptons, as she plots revenge against the evil couple that framed her father for participating in a terrorist attack some twenty years before. While Conrad Grayson (Henry Czerny) was responsible for orchestrating the set-up, it’s his wife, Victoria (Madeleine Stowe), who’s the real object of Emily’s revenge, partly because she was having an affair with her father, and had a very real opportunity to save him. And Stowe pretty much steals the show with her glacial performance, turning it into a series of sublime stare-offs in which people seem to go for minutes without altering their facial expressions, so still that you start to see the micro-movements that aren’t usually visible, magical twitches from the deep past that normally pass without notice. While it might seem silly to mention The Great Gatsby in the same sentence as Revenge, that doesn’t mean it’s not an influence either, as the series positively fetishises all the cavernously romantic vistas that draw Emily and Victoria’s houses into a single sightline, panoramas wide enough to incorporate the very past into their purview, as they glide and swell around the impossibly long jetty that partitions the properties. In fact, it’s not hard to see this millennial version of West Egg in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation, just as it’s not hard to see wider millennial anxieties at play either – although Emily’s revenge plan dates from 2002, she yearns for 1995, just before the terrorist attack happened, dovetailing pre-9/11 nostalgia with 90s nostalgia, as if to imagine how that fateful day might have looked interpolated into the lush mid-90s instead of the frenzied early-00s. So while digital glitch abounds - Emily’s often a hactivist as much as an avenger - it’s swathed in a kind of amalgam of mid-90s textures, poised at the limpid moment when the erotic thriller devolved into the slasher revival. Far from the trash-Hamptons that we’ve come to know from reality television, we’re presented here with something more like the luminosity of the I Know What You Did Last Summer cycle – there’s the same airbrushed palette oversaturating everything with vespertine porosity, irradiating every space with a bisexual bloom. And since time’s measured so seasonally in the Hamptons, there are constant references to last summer, the summer before and, always, the summer that started the story, dreamily morbid as this gorgeous, wilting rose of a series.