From the sublime to the ridiculous. I don’t often do ranting reviews these days, but He Had It Coming is one of the worst shows I’ve watched in a long time.
I rarely randomly pick something off iPlayer, but the tongue-in-cheek student whodunnit genre has been quite well filled recently by things like One of Us Is Lying and Search Party, and this Australian attempt looked like it might scratch the same itch.
On paper, at least, it has a surprisingly established cast: Lydia West, 33 (It’s a Sin, Years and Years); Natasha Liu Bordizzo, 32 (Ahsoka); and Liv Hewson, 30 (Yellowjackets), who returned to her homeland to film it.
Note the ages – the former two are both playing more than a decade below as new university students (West as an ‘international transfer’), at a campus that seems to have a record low number of students and staff, as well as the now fashionable ‘deliberately ambiguous’ international and era agnostic feel (a la Sex Education), most notable through the deliberately toned-down Australian accents.
Unfortunately, it just doesn’t even come close to fitting together. And while creator Gretel Vella has explained how it went through various changes in genre, format, and premise – it’s still a wonder just why this version made it to production.
The writing attempts to tackle some genuinely serious subjects with dialogue that feels like it came from a teenager’s first script (and not in a good way), juxtaposed with desperately unfunny humour, and a murder mystery that rarely has any weight or sense. While many shows – The Afterparty, for example – strike this balance well, the severity of the underlying subject matter here feels particularly uneasy here against the constant lurches into farce.
I could go on. There’s multiple smaller but very irritating issues too. The whole production feels restricted and cheap – every protest, party or societies fair seems to have about the same dozen people at it, completely undoing any diegetic illusion. Hewson’s campus liaison character never quite makes sense, and that’s before a hopeless cop and then a retired detective inexplicably turn up and completely break any remaining semblance of credibility to the narrative. The actual police’s whereabouts? No idea. As for forcing Lydia West into performing slapstick, including a whole episode of fake retching, enough said.
Slight spoiler – the most damning praise I can give it is this: He Had It Coming eventually surprises by revealing an actual plot twist, and even the audacity to end on a cliffhanger, which would ordinarily be designed to propel you into another series… except, I couldn’t have cared less what happens next.