Anna Paquin's Flack is sporadically insightful yet retrograde with its portrayal of a complicated woman

The Atlantic

"One day there might be a television show about a complicated woman with a morally problematic profession whose personal life isn’t a train wreck," says Sophie Gilbert of the six-part Pop TV British drama that has Paquin playing the head of a crisis PR firm. "Flack, however, is not that show. Like Homeland, it seems stuck on the idea that only a hopelessly damaged woman could do such grim work, which the series itself then contradicts by making Robyn’s efficiency in the face of her onerous tasks seem oddly satisfying. Flack’s ideas about women are sometimes tediously rote, and its writing, while snappy and caustically funny, tends to rely on long, Sorkinian expository monologues that always feel overly theatrical on television. (Oliver Lansley, who created the show, is an actor and a playwright.) And yet the series also touches on subjects and themes that feel vital and underplayed in drama right now. Like: What compels people to do awful things? Does the nature of celebrity itself create monsters? Is genuine rehabilitation for people in the public eye even possible? In its best moments, Flack is a bleak workplace comedy studded with talent."

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