‘This Town’ shows that TV’s musical ‘cheat code’ can only go so far

Steven Knight’s new BBC drama has a soundtrack for the ages, writes Louis Chilton. If only it had anything else going for it...

Man about town: Levi Brown as Dante Williams in ‘This Town' (BBC)

Close your eyes, and This Town sounds like one heck of a TV series. The new Birmingham-set drama from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight has plenty of moments that made me feel as if I were watching something really quite good. Rioters skirmishing with police to the thrashing cymbals of “Jamaica Ska” by Byron Lee and The Dragonaires. A character assembling explosives while singing along to “You Can Get It If You Really Want” by Jimmy Cliff. Two young people conversing in a record shop while moping along to “Take This Longing” by Leonard Cohen. So why don’t I feel like singing its praises?

Appropriately, for a series juxtaposing the 1980s music scene with broader social violence and disarray, This Town has a brilliant and punchy soundtrack. UB40, Ray Charles, The Specials, The Clash, Bob Marley: the six-part series manages to drop more needles than a startled acupuncturist. Other than this, however – and despite our critic’s verdict to the contrary – This Town doesn’t do a lot to recommend itself. It’s a clunkily written and middlingly executed piece of social melodrama, one that never manages enough insight or invention to really sell its premise. Its banger-filled jukebox soundtrack might have convinced you otherwise, though. This is, in fact, one of the oldest tricks in the showrunner’s handbook – an easy means of making a bad scene watchable, or a good scene truly great. But the ease is very much the problem. Just because a TV show is full of tight sounds and furious beats, that doesn’t mean it signifies much of anything at all.

Programmes like This Town showcase the beautiful interdisciplinary potential of film and TV as a medium. It is a work of art that is able to interpolate other pre-existing works of art – in this case, popular music, recorded by some of the best to ever do it – along with all the feelings they evoke, all the associations they may carry with them. You hear the sounds of Jimmy Cliff and are swept away. But it is a one-way street. While the music augments what is being shown on screen, This Town does little to enrich the music. That’s fine, to an extent. But the soundtrack ends up working mostly as a disguise, a means of obscuring just how flat or uncompelling what we’re actually watching would otherwise be.

This Town is hardly the first series to attempt to paper over its dramatic shortcomings with a bit of musical X factor. Netflix’s David Nicholls adaptation One Day was similarly lauded for its soundtrack earlier this year – though that may have ended up being the most notable thing about it. In the realm of music biopics, the ruse is even more blatant: the recent reggae release Bob Marley: One Love has shrugged off tepid reviews and a lack of big-name stars, pulling in big audiences purely with the promise of hearing the hits.

The very best TV shows are able to deploy needle drops in ways that are both surprising and meaningful, drawing on the sound and lyrical content of a song in a way that brings out new layers – The Sopranos and Mad Men representing perhaps the apex of this. It’s hard to hear Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” without immediately associating it with the dread-filled diner in the Sopranos finale, or The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” without thinking of Don Draper switching his record player off in disgust, repelled by the Sixties’ cultural new.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with a crowd-pleasing soundtrack. For a series such as This Town, which (rather ham-fistedly) seeks to interrogate the unifying power of music in its very premise, a good soundtrack is pretty much essential. But you need more. If you want an airy chain of 1980s ska bangers, find a Spotify playlist. This is television, and it’s meant to be watched eyes open.

‘This Town’ is available to stream on BBC iPlayer