What to stream this week: con man Robert Chance in BBC First’s witty black comedy The Following Events are Based on a Pack of Lies
- Con man Robert Chance (played by Alistair Petrie) has returned after vanishing for 15 years, and an old victim (Rebekah Staton) is going after him
- Meanwhile, on Disney+, K-drama The Worst of Evil follows criminal gangs in mid-1990s Seoul, combining macho action scenes with an interesting plot
Dr Robert Chance is back from the never-dead-in-the-first-place, having popped out from the matrimonial home for a Chinese takeaway. Fifteen years ago.
Chance is not a doctor and might not even be a Robert, but he is a chancer: an audacious con man who has preyed on a string of vulnerable women and their families to create a fraudster’s well-upholstered lifestyle in The Following Events are Based on a Pack of Lies (BBC First). “Take a chance on me,” one can imagine Chance singing about himself – and they do.
In this wittily titled five-part series, Chance is adroitly played by Alistair Petrie, who makes him a chameleon, effortlessly flattering and solicitous one moment, brimming with menace the next.
But now it seems Chance has chanced his arm past the limit of his good fortune. After a literal chance sighting on an Oxford street, Alice (Rebekah Staton), estranged wife and member of the sisterhood of victims, courageously vows to expose Chance for what he is.
And that is not his new, duplicitous incarnation: a donations-garnering “award-winning eco-preneur”, according to his personal billing. “A property developer from Stoke” (an English industrial city) is Alice’s more accurate, damning appraisal – one running, she might have added, a fake climate academy in Greenland.
Amid the expanding cast of Chance’s swindled victims is his current, biggest mark yet: novelist Cheryl Harker (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), whose generosity and trust are abused by the manipulative, misogynistic Chance.
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What one observer calls the “complex and convincing delusion” he spins around his victims is representative of another strand of the real-life defence mechanism built into Western legal and cultural systems designed to support entitled white men, however guilty they are.
Another previous target recognises the fact that for Chance, the complete, ingratiating con man, “any crisis will do, individual or global”.
But don’t be put off by all the coercion, confusion and cynicism in The Following Events … because the black humour is exquisite. Take a chance.
Hide and seek
The Worst of Evil (Disney+) begins with a bang. A gore-spattered crash, bang, wallop, in fact, occasioned by a gang fight in the confines of a narrow corridor: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
What brings us to this apparent endgame is then explained as this visceral, 12-part crime thriller rewinds to mid-1990s Seoul, where the nightclubs and other cash cows of Gangnam and beyond are controlled by competing mobs.
Into one organisation (in a slightly odd recruitment drive by the scriptwriters) is drawn ambitious, wily, well-known DJ and hard-case Jung Gi-cheul (Wi Ha-joon). But unfortunately for his new employers, he isn’t going to waste time serving in anyone else’s gang when he could be building his own and running drugs to Japan.
His success in his endeavours brings him into the orbit of Park Jun-mo (Ji Chang-wook), who joins Gi-cheul’s outfit undercover.
A maverick, small-town detective looking for promotion to the big city, Jun-mo is a violent firebrand – unstoppable in his new role until a surprise connection emerges between his wife, senior detective Yoo Eui-jeong (Im Se-mi), and boss Gi-cheul.
This is where, even after all the thrills and bloody spills of a host of early action scenes, The Worst of Evil takes a firm grip on its audience (and at last dilutes the almost exclusively male, macho action).
Will Jun-mo, already distrusted by most of his gang’s footsoldiers, be exposed as a police spy? How deep is the danger to Eui-jeong, perturbed by Jun-mo’s secret role and potentially enamoured of Gi-cheul since childhood?
Which side will ultimately be responsible for the worst of evil?
