Patrick Melrose episode 1 review: Benedict Cumberbatch's masterful voyage into drug-addled mania

(Sky Atlantic)

Those who haven't read the source material or watched the trailer might expect something dreary from a show titled Patrick Melrose, possibly a police procedural or a light-hearted rural town drama. But this adaptation of Edward St Aubyn's Booker Prize-winning series is anything but, and plays with our expectations right from the get-go.

The opening scene, in which Benedict Cumberbatch's protagonist receives a phone call informing him of his father's death, on the surface appears almost cliché, Patrick's body doing the familiar hunch-over-and-fall-down as he hears the news. Only it's not grief causing him to stoop, he's nodding on heroin (and having a rather lovely time with it too).

What follows in this opening episode is a drug trip with an itinerary that would make Hunter S. Thompson proud. But while Raoul Duke's descent into psychotropic madness in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was plain for horrified bystanders to see, Patrick's is hidden in plain sight. He's a toff with aristocratic heritage and deep pockets, you see, and all the peers and smiling service industry employees he encounters are either not able to easily recognise the symptoms of drug abuse or are simply too polite to say anything about them.

"I took a Quaalude but it must have been a dud," he tells an attendant at a funeral parlour, to which the man dryly replies: "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that."

Travelling to New York from London to collect his father's ashes, Patrick resolves to quit his drug use, that is after one more nice bit of smack just to smooth over the jet lag. Perpetually trying to outrun the crash of withdrawal, he takes whatever he can get his hands on, or, rather, fill his syringe with.

A possibly non-exhaustive list of drugs we see Patrick doing both separately and all at once in episode one: heroin, cocaine, Quaaludes, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, alcohol.

Most of this wretched consumption takes place in his hotel suite, where he hides under sofas, wallows in bathtubs and convulses on plush rugs. There's no flashy or surrealist direction or camera work here, which either fails to capture the insanity of a drug trip or perfectly captures its outward banality. And that's the interesting thing about Patrick Melrose, it in no way glamourises Patrick's lifestyle, and through narration he reiterates what a pointless existence he is leading.

Girls and Get Out's Alison Williams co-stars

Cumberbatch, who has said that Melrose is one of only two bucket-list roles (the other being Hamlet), is magnificent, managing to convey the maelstrom of colliding chemicals in Patrick's mind while also maintaining a delicate sheen of wit and geniality that allows Patrick to just about a scrape by in the social interactions he is forced to take part in mid-binge. When Alison Williams arrives and gives a pretty flat performance as a dinner date, we're reminded what a virtuosic performance it is that we're seeing from Cumberbatch.

As Patrick goes through the process of repatriating his father's body, we start a flashback sequence that gives clues as to why Patrick is the way he is, hinting that his father (played by Hugo Weaving) abused him throughout his childhood.

Much like recreational drugs themselves, Patrick's episode one trip is savage, unhealthy and yet oddly enjoyable. It's a tragic farce with gallows humour at every turn. Each of the five episodes that comprise the mini-series have been adapted from a different novel in St Aubyn's semi-autobiographical series (the author was once getting through $5,000 worth of drugs a week) and, as off the wall as episode one, 'Bad News', is, future episodes promise a thoughtful and honest exploration of recovery.

Patrick Melrose is not perfect (the production design struggles at times to convey that this is all happening in the eighties), but it's the most immediately engrossing pilot I've seen since Atlanta and The Handmaid's Tale.

Patrick Melrose begins on Sky Atlantic and through NOW TV on 13 May.