Obsession: a series that behaves like a film

Netflix released Obsession on 13 April 2023: four episodes, none of them much over forty minutes, written by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Benji Walters, directed by Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa. Richard Armitage plays William, a surgeon. Charlie Murphy plays Anna, who is engaged to his son. Indira Varma plays William’s wife.

The source is Josephine Hart’s novel Damage, published in 1991 and filmed by Louis Malle the following year from a David Hare script, with Jeremy Irons in the Armitage part. That lineage is the most important fact about the series and the one most of the coverage treated as a footnote.

One change from the earlier versions is worth pausing on, because it is a choice about what kind of authority the man has. In the novel and in Malle’s film he is a politician, so his ruin is a public matter and the story runs on hypocrisy: a man who legislates for other people cannot govern himself. The 2023 version makes him a surgeon. That shifts the register from public standing to bodily control, from a man who makes rules to a man whose profession is precision with other people’s flesh. It is a good instinct, and the series does very little with it.

The limit, stated by the person who hit it

Before release, Lloyd Malcolm gave an interview to Zoe Williams, published on 4 April 2023 in the Irish Times, that is more useful than anything in the finished programme. She was clear about her intention. “It was really important to me to not be saying anything like: ‘BDSM sex is bad sex,’” she said. She was equally clear about the constraint she was working inside: the show had to be a vanilla version of kink, because it was mainstream TV. What that meant in practice, by her own description, was ribbon, restraint and blindfolds, rather than the harder and darker register she associated with pornography.

Read those two statements next to each other and you have the whole problem of kink on television in about forty words. A writer wants to avoid the implication that this sex is damaging. The commissioning environment permits her a soft, decorative version of it. And the plot she has been handed is a thirty-year-old machine for demonstrating that a man’s desire destroys his family.

The intention loses. It was always going to lose, because the intention lives in the dialogue and the tone while the argument lives in the structure, and nobody had to write a line condemning the affair for the ending to condemn it.

There is a second tension in how the thing was sold. Rolling Stone reviewed it under a headline proposing that it might be Netflix’s kinkiest series to date, a framing several outlets echoed, and that is a striking position for a programme its own writer had already described as a deliberately mild version of the subject. Both descriptions can be true at once, which is the useful part. What counts as extreme on a mainstream platform is set so low that a show built from ribbon and blindfolds can be marketed as the far edge of what streaming will carry. The same interview makes a related observation in passing: it is only now that intimacy coordinators are standard that a drama can let sex drive a plot rather than decorate one. The infrastructure for filming this material has improved considerably faster than the range of things anyone is permitted to say with it.

Four episodes is not episodic time

Television’s advantage with this subject is duration. Billions spent eighty-four episodes letting a submissive lead be an ordinary fact about a marriage, and the ordinariness was purely a function of the running time. Bonding had the opposite problem, fifteen-minute episodes with no room for the conversations the subject requires, and it got the criticism that follows from that.

Obsession has neither shape. Four episodes at that length is a long film cut into quarters, and it behaves like one. There is one relationship, one escalation, one collapse. No subplot develops on its own clock. No scene exists because the season had room for it. The form gives the material no time to become normal and no reason to be examined, only time to intensify, which is the single thing this plot already knew how to do in 1991.

That makes the series genuinely useful as evidence, if not as viewing. It is the control case. Take the kink material out of episodic television and put it back inside film’s running time, and the old defaults come straight back: the affair as fever, the woman as its carrier, the ending as consequence. Nothing about the streaming platform, the intimacy coordinator or the writer’s stated position changed that outcome, and the only variable that moved was the running time.

Whose interiority, and who is watching whom

Lloyd Malcolm’s chief structural intervention was to fill Anna out. In the novel she is barely present as a person, closer to an event that happens to a family than a character with reasons, and the writer said in the same interview that she wanted to understand her more.

The attempt is visible and it is worth crediting. Anna gets a history, a family, a logic. Charlie Murphy, discussing the part with Kate Solomon in the Independent that April, described her as occupying several positions at once in William’s life, from lover to guide to supplier, which is a more interesting account of the character than the 1992 film’s version had access to.

But interiority given in backstory is not the same as authority given in the frame, and the two keep coming apart here. The series is still organised around a man’s compulsion. He is the one who acts, who risks, who loses, and whose deterioration supplies the shape of every episode. Anna is understood and still positioned as the thing that is happening. Compare Story of O, where an adaptation kept every prop of its source and lost the narrating consciousness that made the book work. Obsession does something closer to the reverse and arrives in a similar place: it hands the woman an inner life and then builds the camera around the man anyway.

The stated intention and the inherited plot

There is no dishonesty here, which is what makes it worth writing about. The writer said what she wanted, the production hired an intimacy coordinator, the performers have talked sensibly in public about how the scenes were made. The failure is not one of care.

It is a failure to notice that a plot carries an argument whether or not anyone writes one. Damage is a story about a respectable man ruined by wanting something too much. Attach kink to that engine and kink becomes the mechanism of ruin, no matter how gently it is filmed and no matter what the writer says in interviews. The ribbon and the blindfold do not soften the claim. They only make it prettier, and a decorative version of a practice is easier to read as a symptom than a specific one would be, because there is nothing in it that looks like two people making an arrangement.

What the series demonstrates, then, is not that mainstream television cannot handle this material. It is that a show has to want something from the material other than intensity. Given four episodes and a plot from 1991, Obsession wanted intensity, got it, and was widely found tedious anyway.