For those loyal fans out there: The Honourable Woman comes to an end next week. Which, if you're as deep into it as we are, is basically the biggest disaster to happen to telly since Mischa Barton thought it acceptable to up and quit The OC after series three. NEWSFLASH MARISSA, IT WASN'T OK. YOU RUINED EVERYTHING.
Anyways, back to *The Honourable Woman. *Don't worry if you haven't got into it just yet. After all, summer’s kind of a weird time to get into a show. You were probably on holiday for one episode and out in a beer garden for another. Plus, no one's in work to talk about it. What you do need to do now though is start on the old iPlayer catch up immediately. You've got just over two weeks to get through all the episodes before they're taken down and after that you'll have to like, buy the DVD or something. You can queue up for it in HMV along with all the other over-40s not tech savvy enough to watch things online. Losers.
The show's about Nessa Stein (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a rich Israeli/British heiress and CEO who, along with her brother Ephra, is trying to fund education and internet access for Palestinians in a bid to help bring peace in the Middle East. That's pretty much all we can tell you with out giving loads away. The whole thing's mired in secrets, both emotional and governmental, which slowly unravel as the eight episodes progess.
Here’s why you need to get it before it goes.
Maggie Gyllenhaal can wear clothes like nobody’s business
From the black-and-green leopard-print Roland Mouret dress in the first episode to the Céline-esque silk blouses from following weeks, Maggie Gyllenhaal has got it going ON. I mean it helps that her character Nessa is like a gazillionaire and can actually afford a wardrobe that’s worth more than the net worth of a small town in Lincolnshire, but that’s not stopped us Googling ‘cut-price Nessa Stein knock-offs’ each week. Although TBH if we came halfway close to emulating any one of Nessa’s sass-tastic business-meets-fashion looks, we’d probably manage to spill red wine down ourselves immediately.
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It goes some way to explaining how complicated the whole Palestinian/Israeli crisis is
It’s an unhappy coincidence that the show’s air date coincided with the resurgence of troubles in Gaza, but it does go some way to explaining to audiences the complicated and deeply entrenched nature of the conflict. The Honourable Woman involves multiple countries, multiple intelligence agencies, input from activists and terrorists on all sides, high-level corruption and is enough to make you feel completely helpless at the complexity of it all.
It’s all about the strong female characters
In addition to Maggie Gyllenhaal's Nessa Stein, CEO of a multi-million dollar industry, there’s also Janet McTeer’s Julia Walsh – head of MI6; Rachel, Ephra’s no-nonsense wife; Frances, Nessa’s private secretary more than capable of heading off the press in clipped tones at a moment's notice; Monica, brought in to replace MI6’s outgoing Middle East desk head Sir Hugh Hayden-Hoyle; and Atika Halabi – Rachel and Ephra’s housekeeper who’s hiding about a thousand secrets. In comparison, Ephra and Sir Hugh both demonstrate pathetically weak constitutions in several scenes.
There’s a cliffhanger at the end of every episode
I mean we’re going to struggle to elaborate on this one since, you know, we don’t want to give anything away. But believe us when we say that even if you find your footing at some point and you think you know where it's all going be prepared to have the metaphorical chair kicked out from under you over and over again. Murders, kidnappings and *Gone Girl-*magnitude twists are all on the table so be prepared for anything.
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Even if you don’t quite understand it all, it’s EXCITING
You know like with West Wing and ER where you understood like 80% of everything that was said but it didn’t massively matter because the characters were all WALKING and TALKING with a PURPOSE that was really quite exciting and infectious? Frontal temporal zygomatic craniotomy? Yes George Clooney, right away George Clooney. Yeah, this is sort of the same. Most of it goes in just fine, it's just when they start talking about 'annual exports' and 'tax' and stuff like that, we sort of lost it a bit. Kind of like in real life, which is why we owe the tax man £213. Oops.
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Follow Jess on Twitter @jess_commons
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.