Michael Sheen, James Graham and Adam Curtis collaborate and ...

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The refugees sit huddled on a small inflatable dinghy, buffeted by the waves of the English Channel. White, working class and Welsh, they have no home, nor hope, left in Britain. 

This inversion of the migrant narrative plays out in The Way, a thought-provoking new three-part BBC series born of a collaboration between actor Michael Sheen (directing), dramatist James Graham (writing) and documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis (executive producing). An exploration of state, society and selfhood, it is a work of evident ambition but uneven execution that never quite coheres or even settles on a genre. 

We begin with a slice of social-realism in Port Talbot, Wales, a once-prominent steelworks town where the people and industry have been left to slowly rust. But when a tragedy symptomatic of decades of neglect occurs, anger shakes the community from its malaise, inspiring first anomie, then anarchy. Within days, what starts as a local cause grows into a viral movement seized upon by disaffected masses who descend on the Welsh coast. They are swiftly followed by the army, which implements a total lockdown of Wales. 

Caught in the middle of the carnage are the Driscolls, a family united only in their disappointment in one another. The father, Geoff (Steffan Rhodri), is a factory worker who calls for pragmatism and is branded a coward — not least by his firebrand estranged wife Dee (Mali Harries) and son Owen (Callum Scott Howells), a twentysomething numbed by drugs and despair. Searching for meaning in the melee, Owen ends up in serious danger. On the other side of the barricades, his police officer sister Thea (Sophie Melville) witnesses disturbing acts of “law enforcement” that prompt her to lead her family in an escape from the town. 

The first episode, which builds up to the riots, is by far the strongest and the one in which the unmistakable hand of Curtis is most keenly felt. Both aesthetically in how it combines ghostly archival footage, abrupt cuts and absurd visual jokes to terrific effect, and thematically, in its scrutiny of ideology, authority and how random moments can alter epochs. By contrast, the next two chapters are tonally inconsistent and narratively unfocused. Following the Driscolls’ trek across “an island that’s gone mad”, these episodes jump erratically from contemporary issues to semi-mythic allegory; survival adventure to domestic drama; winking whimsy to po-faced soul-searching.

Clearly, the Driscolls’ journey is a figurative as well as a literal one, as they attempt to unburden themselves of individual and collective traumas during their odyssey. But neither the story of a family’s struggle to come together nor the tale of a nation falling apart is as sharp as you’d expect from the trio of talents behind the series. 

The depiction of Britain’s almost overnight slide into an authoritarian, Welsh-persecuting dystopia seems especially rushed and thinly sketched. Scenes showing internment camps, vigilantes on borders, caged children and tech corruption are clearly designed to provoke, but lack sufficient context and detail to say something specific and significant about either today’s or tomorrow’s Britain. As it is, the events depicted often seem arbitrary. Perhaps that’s the point — a warning of how easily a seemingly free and tolerant society can lose its way.

★★☆☆☆

BBC1, tonight at 9pm, then weekly. All three episodes on BBC iPlayer now