I’m here to be an artist?!” Alas, poor Elise. No amount of wounded upspeak can disguise the fact that she is an aspiring artist in much the same way a bag of flour is an aspiring pastry. Her “work”, bless it, consists of daubing clothes on to impressionist nudes – a “protest”, apparently, against the patriarchy and its preoccupation with “ancient bush”.
Unctuous Professor Phoenix (Harry Greenwood) is unimpressed. The problem, explains Phoenix, slowly, is a lack of ambition. Feminist art isn’t for amateurs.
The body of an alpha-jock has been discovered, sans penis, at the foot of the malleted effigy. The victim was, it seems, a rapist and a bully. He Had It Coming’s tagline is “Bad feminists.
Worse detectives”, which makes it sound like an edgy Rosemary & Thyme reboot in which Pam Ferris and Felicity Kendal trample topsoil through a succession of crime scenes while shouting about Mooncups. But this Sydney-set series has loftier ambitions. What happens, it asks, when it is men, rather than women, who are forced to live with the constant threat of sexual intimidation and assault?
Among the hot potatoes swept up in the ensuing eight episodes are misogyny, victim-blaming and social media’s complicity in harassment. And yet it quickly becomes clear that this black comedy is not entirely comfortable with the task it has set itself. It seems alarmed, somehow, by its own politics.
Like poor Elise’s hopeless paintings, He Had It Coming appears to believe that simply pointing at something bad while going “nyer” is enough to convince onlookers that this constitutes a searing analysis of said bad thing. Which it most certainly does not. Instead, it spends most of its time avoiding the tricky stuff and focusing on its gleefully silly murder investigation, which entails Elise and Barbara galumphing around campus like pantomime horses while neighing quarter-witted theories into their neon-pink walkie-talkies.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
