Binge-r #234: The Irregulars + Operation Varsity Blues
Street Spirit: Bea (Thaddea Graham) and Dr Watson (Royce Pierreson) in The Irregulars
THE IRREGULARS S1
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All eight episodes now streaming
There’s no mystery to it: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is the source material that keeps on giving. Incarnations of the Victorian-era sleuth are endless, as are the twists. At this point it’s almost as if you can spin the content wheel and get a brief. Wonder what would happen if ‘teenage adventure’, ‘supernatural’, and ‘spiciness’ came up? Here’s The Irregulars to provide an answer. Netflix’s new adolescent thriller is, well, see the previous sentence. By reinventing the Baker Street Irregulars, the street lads who did scout work for Holmes and Dr Watson in several of the original texts, creator Tom Bidwell (My Mad Fat Diary) gets a revisionist take that slots neatly – mostly – into today’s streaming landscape.
Leaning to an adolescent audience and devotees of the otherworldly, the show moves with blithe ease between multiple worlds – the slums of London and wealthy drawing rooms, criminal investigations and horror film set-pieces. Orphans or abandoned, the teenage protagonists are cellar dwellers who look out for – and at – each other. Bea (Thaddea Graham) is tough cookie boss, her younger sister Jessie (Darci Shaw) has powers that transcend the era’s occult fascination, Billy (Jojo Macari) is the prospective tough lad, and Spike (McKell David) is basically a +1 for any scene that requires two Irregulars. Over at 221B Baker St the new Dr Watson (Royce Pierreson) and Holmes (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) are hardly benefactors. The former drives a hard bargain, the latter is first encountered vomiting.
Everything is a mix: a little grime, then some teenage implausibility. The Irregulars won’t return to the brutal workhouses, where Bea and Jessie remember childhood trauma, but they also soon gain a pal for their enquiries in the form of Leopold (Harrison Osterfield), a royal heir who casually sneaks out to join their missions and has the impeccable ruling trait of haemophilia. Leopold is attracted to Bea, adding to Billy’s disdain for the “posh boy”, and it has to be said that the success of Netflix’s Bridgerton [full review here] has snuck into the saucy final edit. With some Guy Ritchie flourishes such as bare-knuckle boxing, it adds to an ungainly tone. The Irregulars, like its young protagonists, wants to be many things when its spook of the week format is sometimes all it needs.
Bird on the Wire: Matthew Modine (Rick Singer) in Operation Varsity Blues
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
OPERATION VARSITY BLUES (Netflix, 2021, 100 minutes): Chances are you already know about the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal – actors Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin being among the more than 50 people arrested for paying bribes to get their children into elite American universities made the news pop. This documentary, from Fyre festival director Chris Smith [full review here], doesn’t enlarge the brief, but it tells the story exceptionally well, establishing a rhythm of privilege and corruption that speaks to an American need to create and celebrate flawed hierarchies. With access to the FBI’s phone taps between parents and their facilitator, college entrance coach Rick Singer, the film makes genuinely good use of recreations – with Matthew Modine as the driven Singer - to capture the way the elite happily slid into breaking the law (often via brazenly devious means). There’s blame to spare – shout out to the greedy institutions whose sporting coaches Singer reeled in – but it has to be said that the pay-off here delivers. The fall from grace, not to mention the perp-walk montage, which the narrative builds to is truly satisfying.
New on Stan: Never quite the sum of its Gothic horror and haunted house influences, Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015, 119 minutes) does have a vivid drama that allows Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, and Mia Wasikowska to get sinister; Carlito’s Way (1993, 145 minutes) reunited Scarface’s director Brian De Palma and star Al Pacino for a melodrama-tinged ageing gangster epic whose plot lacks the grace of the camera technique.
New on SBS on Demand: Days of Being Wild (1990, 90 minutes) was the breakthrough feature internationally for the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai – a masterfully gilded evocation of self-destructive longing that focuses, through languidly intimate poses, 1960 period detail, and erotic tension, on a wayward lothario (Leslie Cheung) and the woman he seduces and spurns (Maggie Cheung).
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