Malice (series): Just not unique enough to be more than "meh"

Lately there have been quite a few good series that have been released and I will say right away that this is a real reason why I might be a bit more judgmental than I normally would be about a series.

I started watching Malice for the same reason that probably almost everyone else did - because David Duchovny is in it. I stuck around for 2 episodes because there was some decent story in there but for the most part this "slow burn" fizzles in a lot of places and it also suffers from implausibility and chance encounters / wild coincidences that turn me away from being able to enjoy a lot of things.

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While I will keep this as spoiler-free as possible some might slip through so if you want to see this one, maybe come back and read this after you have already seen 2 episodes or so.

Just know that I don't recommend this one unless you have nothing else to watch. I doubt I will finish this one because I'm pretty sure that I can guess my way through to the finish of it in that I feel it is heading towards a "Cape Fear" sort of situation.

Malice stars Jack Whitehall who plays Adam, a charismatic and good-looking nanny and tutor who ends up traveling with the Tanner family who is ultra-wealthy and need someone to keep their kid's education in line while they go on an extended vacation in I think it is Greece. This right away kind of chased me towards not feeling this is plausible. I know the world has abandoned most traditional gender roles, but let's be honest, this isn't a big market for male nannies these days especially with the widespread fear of potential kiddy-fiddlers.

The ultra-wealthy would like have an extreme amount of vetting involved before they hired someone for this job but as far as what is presented to us, the audience, that doesn't appear to have happened with Adam in Malice. These are the sorts of details that I need if I am going to get on board with something.

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Adam is brought on as a nanny and tutor for Dexter Tanner, the youngest child of the family. He quickly kind of weasels his way into being pals with the family and this sort of rubbed me the wrong way as well. I would think that someone that is as successful at the Tanner patriarch would want to maintain a professional distance between him and the "help" as is so often the case with the ultra wealthy, but to quote that one famous YouTube channel, Adam getting right in there as a central figure in all that the Tanners do was "super easy, barely an inconvenience."

Soon we start to unravel that Adam isn't just here for a job, he has either specifically targeted the Tanners because of Jamie Tanner (Duchovny) and doesn't like him, or he figures out that he can take advantage of the family once he is there. He proceeds to sabotage various aspects of the family vacation and it becomes increasingly malicious as time goes by.

Many of these situations are pretty coincidental and this is something else I have a problem with: There is no way that Adam would have known the various ins and outs of what the Tanner vacation was going to entail, so the fact that he has such a well-formulated plan that seems to be tailor-made for the very specific situations that he finds himself in, seem a bit too convenient for the advancement of the plot.

I suppose they had to do it that way.

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herein lies one of the biggest issues I have with the overall plot as far as it relates to what would actually happen in the real world. Extremely successful people are very rarely taken aback or manipulated by people that are significantly less successful than they are, but Jaime seems to be a bit of a coward and allows Adam to take control on a regular basis. I would imagine that if a family was on vacation and things started to go horribly awry once a new tutor/nanny was introduced to the mix, that they wouldn't experience a great deal of difficulty in identifying what has changed and eliminate it... yet that doesn't happen. Sensibility doesn't exist in this story why? Because it needs to not exist for the BS "Eat the Rich" plot to continue.

I suppose if I was going to say something good about this series is that despite it being a slow burn, it is only 6 episodes long and I attribute that mostly to it being A British show, where they don't tend to do this stupid adherence to a certain number of episodes whether or not they actually have a story long enough to fill all those episodes.

I do not feel as though I have spoiled anything in the above because I haven't told you anything specific and it is evident that this is the way it is heading in both the trailer as well as the first 10 minutes of the very first episode.

Should I watch it?

I think the only reason why you should watch this is for the same reason that I did: You have already watched all the available episodes of Pluribus, Land Man, and The Chair Company and you need something to pass the time until the next ep comes out next week. All of those shows are far better than this one.

I do not think this is worth the 6 hours that it entails. It's dreadfully predictable and implausible as well. It isn't awful, and it isn't as bad as a lot of other shite that is out there for now, so because of that I will not give it a flat "stay away."

_{the only legal way to stream this at the moment is via an Amazon Prime subscription}