TV Rewind: Andrew Haigh’s Nautical Drama The North Water Was Too Good to Sink (But Too Dense to Float)
Photo Courtesy of AMC
Editor’s Note: Welcome to our TV Rewind column! The Paste writers are diving into the streaming catalogue to discuss some of our favorite classic series as well as great shows we’re watching for the first time. Come relive your TV past with us, or discover what should be your next binge watch below:
For a miniseries about Victorian whalers, Arctic survival, and the bleeding, cruel heart of man, The North Water’s arrival on streaming shores in 2021 was nothing less than unceremonious. It was expensive, it was serious, it was teeming in grit and moral unpleasantness—but despite a warm British reception at time of release, it’s clear, 2.5 years later, that it failed to make a significant splash.
But as a case study of the habits of British programming and how a show’s quality has nothing—has everything—to do with not resonating with a Peak TV-ed streaming audience, it’s nothing short of fascinating. Now that Andrew Haigh (writer and director of all five episodes) is enjoying some of his biggest buzz for All of Us Strangers, it’s worth diving into a series that was encouraged and then punished by the harsh turning tide of modern TV.
About ten years after first making a splash in the British indie scene, Jack O’Connell (Unbroken, Lady Chatterley’s Lover) starred as traumatized period-era surgeon Patrick Sumner, disgraced from a recent army campaign in India and addicted to hard medicinal spirits. The only job available to him is as a ship’s doctor on a whaling expedition, where he shares closed quarters with the repulsive harpooner Henry Drax (Colin Farrell), a drunken, slovenly man who we see murder a stranger before the ship (named Volunteer) even leaves the harbor.
Neither man knows, however, that the ship will never return to shore—Captain Brownlee (Stephen Graham) has arranged with the wealthy owner Baxter (Tom Courtenay) to sink the ship as part of an insurance scam. Wouldn’t you know it, soon the ship is taken by violence and dissent, forcing the dwindling survivors to confront man’s inherent devility on the icy Arctic plains.
If it’s not clear, The North Water is designed on a foundational level for a Prestige TV crowd that may no longer exist: It’s a period series, but filled with spit, dirt, and curses. Everyone has trauma (who didn’t back then?) and lashes out in blunt, gruesome violence. Themes of human nature versus regular nature! Who is an animal, who is a devil—is man a combination of the two? We have a reliable but unflashy actor for our protagonist and a high-caliber A-lister in an attention-grabbing supporting role, who has undergone a physical transformation that almost begs to be described as “unrecognizable.”
Expect big sets, big effects, actually-in-the-Arctic-ocean locations (apparently the furthest north any TV drama has ever filmed), as well as cinematic lighting and immersive soundscapes that would look terrific on a cinema screen but risk appearing dim and muddy on the average television. Anecdotally, this type of show would be perfect for my Peaky Blinders-loving grandmother, but she didn’t watch past the first episode because she couldn’t actually see what was happening. The “please light TV correctly” discourse has traveled as far north as Scotland.
While it’s clear the scale and period aesthetic of The North Water would never happen were it not for Peaky Blinders’ explosion the decade before, these details all feel like red flags now that we know more about networks’ mad rush to make Prestige Streaming Hits. These shows are expensive, slow, brooding—all delightful attributes to modern drama, but are no longer unique or guarantors of quality. It is neither shocking nor confounding that The North Water enjoyed a fair share of obligatory praise before gently bubbling beneath the surface of The Sea of Streaming.
