“You Irish. You’re fucking dark!”

Dead Still (RTE, 2020)

If nothing else Dead Still (2020) is a genuine attempt to play with Irish television’s tendency toward generic imitation. A Victorian comedy-drama where the police chase porn peddling communists around Dublin was most likely not on anybody’s list of expectations for 2020. 2020 was nothing if not the year of the unexpected. It is its treatment of the dead that sets the series apart. If dark farce does not already exist as a genre then John Morton, the series creator and writer, seems to have invented it. In Dead Still, corpses are not simply set dressing or plot devices, their existence is the point, and the dead hang around from episode to episode. This is apparent from the beginning.

The dead female body, in particular, has been aestheticised to the point where it seems to have passed through established trope, to self-aware parody, to barely acknowledged set dressing. This has equally been the case with dramas from the Law and Order or CSI gene pool, as with the more lauded and gritty dramas like The Fall, Luther, or most of the Nordic noir output. So, there is something quite touching about a drama in which dead bodies take up screen time, as objects by definition, but as objects to be mourned and memorialised, rather than avenged or dismembered. This is established at the very beginning of the first episode, when Brock Blenner-Hassett (Michael Smiley) is seen speaking to his subject, seemingly exhorting her to look her best for a traditional family portrait. It is only then revealed that this portrait is a fiction intended to create the illusion of family togetherness and life. The principle subject is in fact a corpse, and she has died of natural causes.

True, there are a number of heavy handed analogues running through the series to contrast past and present, and to underline continuities. It also succeeds in making photography seem alien again, as a tangible and mechanical process. This goes beyond showing the actual labour and equipment involved in making a photograph. It re-establishes photographic practice not merely as a way to thoughtlessly capture a moment, but reminds us that manipulation and circumvention of reality has been present since its inception.

A recurring and somewhat unusual motif, is the desire of those left behind to memorialise their lost loved ones, not simply as individuals but as part of the life they shared together. This is the case with most of the families with whom Blennerhassett works, as well as for Roth, “the former convict, Fenian agitator, and enemy of the crown,” in the first episode. There is a touching moment later in the series when gravedigger turned photographic assistant Conall Molloy reveals how Blennerhassett refused him a picture of his dead wife because he did not have the money to pay for it.

There are a number of issues that hamper the show’s six episode run. Like much RTÉ drama, it feels like a compromise between wanting to be an episodic drama and a serial. This leads to the series as a whole feeling unbalanced and unevenly paced. The main story arc rests on a pornography and snuff photography ring operating in late nineteenth century Dublin, possibly under the auspices of the hellfire club. It is both unsettling and funny. It is undermined by having to share narrative space with traditional “monster of the week” episodes. Twenty-two episode US network shows like The X-Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer can support both. Dead Still is a short series with the ambition of a twelve or twenty episode series. It simultaneously feels like it is trying to do both too much and too little. The Jo Spain penned Taken Down (2018), about the murder of a resident in a direct provision centre, suffered from a similar problem. Properly paced and structured dramatic narratives seem to be particularly difficult to pull off in Ireland. It suggests a lack of resources invested in pre-production script development, rewrites, and editing.

Another element, albeit one that seems to be accidentally partially successful, is a somewhat cavalier approach to production design, which often seems slapdash and full of anachronisms. The cigarette lighter used by Nancy Vickers in the first episode looks suspiciously modern, and Blennerhassett’s gramophone in the final episode seems dropped in from a later period. The series is set around the 1880s, but it often feels less Victorian Dublin and more an Irish version of steampunk. It leaves Dublin feeling both familiar and other worldly, an “othering” that underlines the alien atmosphere of a series set in a period underexplored by Irish drama. What sets it apart from a number of other recent RTE series is its relative originality, one of tone and mood, rather than format or genre. While it contains certain set pieces of gruesome body horror, it is toned down in comparison to Penny Dreadful or Ripper Street, both filmed in Dublin, and a seemingly conscious decision to play to the strengths of Irish television production. It almost feels like somebody noticed that Ireland has been doing producing generic period drama for the best part of a decade, with the set and costume designers with the skills to create a semi convincing 19th century Dublin.

Dead Still takes place during the land war, which is referenced more than once, and both after the Great Hunger and on the cusp of the Gaelic revival. This is a period when the most prominent Dublin writers of the age, like Wilde and Shaw, were more inclined to write about the political and personal dramas of the English, than about the city of their birth. It is a city struggling with the shift to modernity, while dragging the past along with it. In fact, while the inclusion of communists, and American smut peddlers might seem random, it establishes Dublin not only as part of the United Kingdom, but as a place open to much wider forces and influences. Class and gender are far bigger sources of division than national identity, as is the conflict between Dublin and Cork. Conall Molloy is from the Monto (a famous red light district in north Dublin city), and Nancy Vickers is a proto feminist member of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Insofar as the clash between the British and the Irish is rehearsed, it is in the clash between enlightenment rationality and traditional superstition:

This is not the boglands. This is Dublin, part of the British Empire. How many changelings and pucas do you see roaming the streets? Leave that oul’ blather to the Fenians. We deal in facts. Proof.

This is an admonition from Detective Regan’s superior, and describes the perceived role of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, attempting to impose rational modernity in a city where a rising body count is attributable to a case which seems to have been dragged from the depths of Irish folk horror. The series gleefully draws from Irish popular history and folk legend. For example, the Hellfire Club, a debauched drinking society of popular lore, is repurposed into a shadowy cabal, trading in illicit images of the recently deceased.

Dead Still is preoccupied with meaning, particularly the meaning we bestow upon images. The importance of context in which the images are experienced is crucial. How photographs possess meaning for the beholder, but also how this meaning is also dependent upon the pre-existing narratives brought to bear upon them. This is especially pertinent in the case of the death photography practiced by Brock Blennerhassett. There is little practical difference in the creation of a memorial photograph by Blennerhassett, and the creation of a photograph of a murder victim. This is shown in the obvious parallels between Blennerhassett’s work, and the photographing of the killing of his nephew and the attempted killing of his niece, Nancy. The main difference is in presentation and purpose. In the former case, the illusion of peaceful passing, and even continuing life are central to the memorialisation. In the latter, photographs presumably created for the Hellfire Club, the presence of markers of violence on the corpse are central to the presentation, and to the pleasure experienced by the beholder. The images are moments in time, but they are moments either freighted with good memories and familial bonds, or with fear and violent death. A similar, if less explored, further example is Blennerhassett’s contracting by Inspector Regan, as a proto-crime scene photographer. The dead and their memorialisation is far more present in this series than in other crime dramas.

The characters range from the fully drawn to the frustratingly under developed, another consequence of the short run, and another reason to hope that there will be a second, slightly longer, and better-paced season. Brock Blennerhassett is a photographer, and an estranged member of a declining Anglo-Irish family. Period drama is very often a place where women are given marginalised roles, often accompanied by the shrugging justification that that is just how things were. That is why one of strengths of Dead Still is how it manages to create historically realistic women, but who also occupy pivotal roles in the plot. Nancy Vickers is a wannabe actress, an ostentatious smoker, and possibly a proto Constance Markiewicz. References to Ireland’s place within the empire are marginal but she gets one of the best lines, when asked by the Dublin Castle Detective Regan is she has seen any suspicious foreigners hanging around; “You mean apart from the British?” Betty Regan, wife of the Dublin Castle detective is saved from being a stereotypical domestic despot, by the genuine partnership with her husband, and the way he uses her as a sounding board for his theories. The fact that they are often both wrong, carried away by their flights of fancy, is beside the point. They discuss cases over breakfast and their theories while they jointly hang out the washing. In a nod to the interpersonal squabbles characteristic of the streaming age, the Regans’ joint reading of The Moonstone is presented as modern couples may have watched shows like Breaking Bad, with irritation caused on both sides as one moves ahead of the other in the story. The historically plausible mother and daughter team of seance scammers provide more comic relief, and also undercut any suggestion that the series narrative takes the supernatural seriously. Similarly, Conall Molloy’s foulmouthed sister is underused, but works especially well alongside Nancy Vickers.

So, what makes this series interesting, despite its shortcomings? For a start it is unusual and refreshing to see a Dublin depicted onscreen, that is neither post-Celtic Tiger steel and glass, nor dystopic gangland hellhole. The Dublin (and Wicklow) of Dead Still, is late Victorian, with an atmosphere that owes a lot to the popular fiction of the time. This is the Ireland of Bram Stoker and Sheridan leFanu. While the show is also cavalier in its use of anachronism, and recreates the period with broad brushstrokes rather than rather than painstaking exactitude, it is still bracing to see this Dublin. Dublin post-famine, a British city close to the heart of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, but also miles away from it, both geographically and in culture of terms. It has its own popular culture, one that as yet seems untainted by post-famine Catholicism and still capable of synthesising its own culture of death, and its own folk horror.

It is also a place where the Monto (Dublin’s infamous pre-independence red light district) plays a prominent role, not merely as a place to be visited (as for example in the work of Joyce) but as a place where people live and rub shoulders. One of the funniest set pieces involves Nancy Vickers (Eileen O’Higgins) attempting to gain information by going undercover as an unconvincing sex worker called Violet.

While it is not attempting to be a capital H historical drama, it is good to see stories rooted in the, admittedly outlandish, everyday life of Dubliners. Regan’s obsessive pursuit of the photo ring is often framed as some weird quixotic irrelevance in a country where Fenians are running around and landlords are being hanged in the land war.

This Dublin is a place where communists, fenians, and pornographers rub shoulders with each other. It is a place where the story arc revolves around the attempt to take down a pornographic and snuff photo ring. Its cast of characters includes an American civil war veterans, the wonderfully monikered Bushrod Whacker (Martin Donovan), fraudulent Irish spiritualists, hapless coppers, and dissolute Irish gentry. It is a Dublin where the spiritualist craze of the late nineteenth century has combined with a native culture around death and grieving. Death photography was a short-lived but very real phenomenon.

Of course, no review written “in these times” is complete without reference to the fact that this darkly comedic drama about the Irish culture of death should air at time when so many of its crucial rituals have been suspended due to the ongoing Covid pandemic, when most of our interpersonal communication is now mediated through moving images by necessity. The desire to hold onto the frozen image of a departed loved one hits much harder in a context where people have been forced to say goodbye by the means of often frozen and stuttering images on mobile phone and tablet screens. In its unintended way it is a timely series.