Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Patrick Melrose’ On Showtime, Where Benedict Cumberbatch Plays A Wealthy Addict Who Gets Clean

If you’ve been needing your Cumberbatch fix lately, then Showtime’s Patrick Melrose might just take care of it. Based on the popular novels by Edward St. Aubyn, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role, it rockets back and forth in time to show Melrose’s rough life and recovery. But will it resonate with audiences?

PATRICK MELROSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A phone rings in a London flat, and a man in a crisp striped shirt answers. A voice from New York tells the man, who attentiveness seems to be wavering, that his father has died. While the man is listening, he starts to slur his speech a bit, then hangs up the phone indifferently as he sinks to the floor. A spot of blood is on his arm.

The Gist: It’s July, 1982, and Patrick Melrose (Benedict Cumberbatch), a young man of means who doesn’t seem to have a job or ambition, says he’s going to get off the heroin, starting with his trip to New York to pick up his father’s ashes. “You like it too much,” says one of his girlfriends, Julia (Jessica Raine). “Addicts don’t give up until they hit rock bottom and you never will.”

One of the things Patrick takes all these drugs to get away from is his complicated relationship with his father David (Hugo Weaving), who was one of those snooty guys who sat in smoky, leather-chaired hunting clubs, but had enough of an edge that he had no problems talking about shooting a man infected with rabies, while 8-year-old Patrick is in earshot. He longs for the attention of his mother Elanor (Jennifer Jason Leigh), but the two have been divorced forever, and when David dies, she’s in Chad working for Save The Children.

In New York, Patrick tries like hell to resist the lure of smack, but the voice in his head is rolling around the number of his NYC dealer, as well as an inner monologue that lists what all of his withdrawal symptoms are as they happen, including the temptation to throw himself out his 33rd floor hotel window. He hallucinates; he thinks the elderly bellman spews fire-and-brimstone monologues on the elevator. Nothing quells the voice; not booze, not uppers or downers, not even cocaine (and why would it?).

He eventually goes on a heroin bender, all the while coming to terms with the fact that this awful influence on his life is gone. At a certain point, he trashes his room with his dad’s urn, and then tries to take enough heroin to not wake up. When he does, he realizes that even he has a rock bottom.

Our Take: Patrick Melrose is based on the novels by Edward St. Aubyn, and the limited series is supposed to track Patrick’s life, from his drug-fueled 20s to his childhood in France to his years being clean. But the first episode, “Bad News,” puts the show on a very unstable footing, mainly because it’s an hour of Patrick trying to keep things together while on he’s on the bender of his life, and everyone around him reacting to that.

Granted, Cumberbatch puts on an acting workshop in the first epsiode, rocketing from slurring to speed-talking, working his way through withdrawal until he gets his next fix. He even manages to convey how vulnerable he really is when he has dinner with Marianne (Allison Williams) a friend of one of his main London squeeze Debbie (Morfydd Clark).

But it’s a very long hour, because there really isn’t anything more to watch than Patrick work through his bender. At this point, all we know is that he’s a wealthy dandy that has a troubled past who manages to charm his way through life. We’re not sure we want to spend any more time with him, despite being fans of Cumberbatch.

Sex and Skin: Patrick’s exchange with Julia is post-coital, though we do see Cumberbatch’s bum when he answers the door to his hotel room when the elderly bellboy delivers a bag from a pharmacy.

Parting Shot: After waking up and realizing he’s still breathing, Patrick calls his friend Johnny (Prasanna Puwanarajah) from the airport and says he’s going to get clean this time. When Johnny asks “What are you going to do next?”, Patrick breaks down in tears, realizing that he has no plan for the rest of his life.

Sleeper Star: We were surprised to see Leigh playing Patrick’s mother, and her presence in the second episode, which takes place in Patrick’s childhood, will likely prompt us to keep watching.

Most Pilot-y Line: Here’s the thing: Cumberbatch can sell the clunkiest dialogue, so we’ll just say that his internal (and sometimes external) monologue sounded way too close to what he used to do as Sherlock Holmes.

Our Call: Stream It, but only because of the great actors involved. But we’re wary that this will be a showcase of excess that doesn’t play well on TV.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Patrick Melrose on Showtime