Hysterical fans of Benedict Cumberbatch, rejoice! The English heartthrob, who started trending worldwide after Sherlock aired on BBC in 2010, is coming back to grace television screens with Patrick Melrose, a Showtime limited series. And if the new trailer of the show is anything to go by, it builds enough anticipation with its tense, hectic, sucker-punch vibe to keep Cumberbatch followers mark out the release date, May 12, with a big red circle on their calendars.
The five-part mini series has been adapted from the critically acclaimed semi-autobiographical novels of Edward St. Aubyn, who creates an alter-ego of sorts in Patrick Melrose. Melrose suffers extreme familial cruelty as a child in a stiff, upper class society in the south of France and becomes a victim of substance abuse and mental illness as an adult.
The first book of the Patrick Melrose series, Never Mind, unfolds over the course of a day in the maternal house of a five-year-old Melrose in Provence, as they expect the arrival of dinner guests. Melrose is raped by his father, with no help from an indifferent mother. And thus begins the turbulent life of a protagonist who is psychologically torn asunder in the midst of abusive parents and the frigid, opaque milieu of an elite, privileged society. In the TV adaptation, each of the five episodes follows the five published books in the Melrose series.
The novels might come under the category of "Misery Memoirs" in the publishing world, but Aubyn's razor-sharp wit and sardonic observations of his upper class milieu save it from any mawkish sentimentality. And it is precisely this aspect of the book series that has been effectively harnessed in the trailer. In a lightening-fast montage of the past and the present, a jittery, high-strung, emotionally fractured Cumberbatch essays the titular Melrose from France to New York to Britain in tragi-comic ways, as he learns to fight the demons of his traumatic childhood. Critics have noted how the trailer "has the frazzled, kinetic mania of a Danny Boyle film."
In January, speaking at the Television Critics Association winter press tour, Cumberbatch spoke about why he got interested in the character of Melrose: “From victim to survivor to champion of his circumstance in a way and via the most richly comic, scalpel-like post-mortem of a class system that is crumbling and the power related to that dissolves as the stories continue."
The show also stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Hugo Weaving as the torturous parents of Cumberbatch. It is directed by Edward Berger of the Deutschland 83 fame.