BritBox Thriller Playing Nice Is Aggravating Yet Compulsively Watchable Television

Domestic thrillers are a dime a dozen on television these days. And, to be fair, they have their place—whether you’re looking for fast-paced plotting, a vague sense of menace, or simply the unapologetic and often campy entertainment, these sorts of shows are almost always on. Some are better than others—and unfortunately, BritBox’s latest entry into this category definitely falls toward the lower end of that spectrum. 

Playing Nice is the sort of drama where almost every character is some combination of deeply aggravating, completely idiotic, or laughably villainous. The plot twists are almost shockingly ridiculous, and there’s very little in the way of narrative nuance. Viewers are constantly asked to suspend their disbelief that any of the show’s preposterously convenient coincidences actually occur, and may well end up yelling at the screen more than once over the various inexplicably dumb choices that play out. And yet, clocking in at a briskly paced, thoroughly tumultuous four episodes (all of which were available for review), it’s also a show that’s surprisingly hard to look away from. 

The story follows a pair of couples who are faced with a parent’s worst nightmare when they learn their young sons were switched at birth. Stay-at-home dad Pete (James Norton) and his restaurateur partner Maddie (Niamh Algar) are not quite making ends meet raising young Theo, and are shocked when the hospital phones to tell them that recent testing on another child reveals two premature babies got mixed up in the intensive care unit three years prior. Suddenly, their lives are unexpectedly thrown together with the much more affluent Lamberts—Miles (James McArdle) and Lucy (Jessica Brown Findlay) are the parents to young David, and live in a spacious, state-of-the-art house complete with nannies, toys, and all manner of luxury. Their two worlds—and their two relationships—couldn’t be more different. 

There’s a different, slightly more serious version of this show that really digs into the ethical quandary at the heart of this story and the primal fear that every new mother undoubtedly possesses that, no matter how unrealistic it might be, her sleep-deprived, drugged-up self might somehow have misplaced her true child in this way. What does it mean to be a family, to truly love a child, is something that another version of this show might have asked, or at least been vaguely curious about. Both couples feel such a deep and evident connection to both children, and that’s the sort of murky emotional stuff a better series probably would have dug into further. Unfortunately, Playing Nice is not that show. Instead, it ramps the melodrama up to eleven.

At first, things seem to be going well: Neither couple wants to give up the child they’re currently raising, nor do they want to be cut out of the lives of the biological son they’ve only just discovered. The group vows to work together and find a path forward that allows young David and Theo to grow up as something like family, which in an unintentional way, they now are. But the group’s peace accord is almost shockingly brief. Before the credits roll on the first episode, we learn that there’s more to Miles and his insistent offers of friendship than meets the eye. Turns out that the Lamberts have been plotting to seek custody of both children all along, and have been establishing a truly breathtaking long-tail con to paint Pete and Maddie as unfit, even dangerous parents.