Ella Purnell has, in a lot of ways, filled the same actorly slot that Christina Ricci filled 20-plus years ago: Beautiful but nerdy, with huge expressive eyes that do a lot of the acting work for her. We’ve seen it in shows as varied as Sweetbitter and Fallout. In a new Starz series, Purnell gets to be both a wallflower and a fierce killer, all in the body of one person.
SWEETPEA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A woman is squeezed between to men in the back of a bus. “People I’d like to kill: manspreaders,” she says in voice over.
The Gist: There are many more people that Rhiannon Lewis (Ella Purnell) wants to kill: An inattentive clerk at a grocery store; just about everyone where she works at a local newspaper, including her boss Norman (Jeremy Swift); her unresponsive sister Seren (Alexandra Dowling); her mom for leaving when she and Seren were kids; her dad Tommy (David Bark-Jones) for dying and leaving her alone.
But the person she most wants dead is Julia Blenkingsopp (Nicôle Lecky), her main torturer in high school, who “made me feel like a ghost,” as Rhiannon says, and made her so stressed she pulled her hair out to the point where she had bald patches.
Well into adulthood, Rhiannon still feels like a ghost, that nobody actually sees her. Tommy, who’s in the hospital, tells her that she needs to stand up for herself more, and roar like she deserves to roar. But when she gets bullied out of getting a nurse to help him, she comes back to his room to see that he’s coded, and the staff can’t save him.
At Tommy’s funeral, complete with his request to have a remake of “I’m On Fire” played, Rhiannon is horrified when she sees that Julia is there; she’s back in town and has established herself as a top real estate agent. In fact, Seren wants Julia to have the listing for Tommy’s house, which she wants to put on the market. One problem: Rhiannon still lives there and wants to stay. And she doesn’t want Julia anywhere near that house, something that Seren doesn’t quite understand.
When she finally comes back to work from bereavement leave, she takes a little initiative and asks Norman if she can be considered for a junior reporter position. He tells her she doesn’t have the “killer instinct” for the job, then turns around and gives the job to a guy named AJ (Calam Lynch), who seems to have a connection to Norman. Rhiannon is so irate she follows AJ to an underpass tunnel with her dad’s old folding knife in hand, but all she manages to do is cut herself.
When a billboard featuring Julia distracts Rhiannon near a bus stop, her beloved dog Tink runs off-leash and gets killed by a car. Thinking this is all Julia’s fault, she drunkenly buried Tink then confronts Julia at the club she and her friends always go to. When that goes about as poorly as one might expect it to go, Rhiannon snaps.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Sweetpea has a sense of humor like Dexter, and it’s about as far a cry from Sweetbitter, the last series Purnell had on Starz, as you can get, despite the similar names.
Our Take: Created by Kirstie Swain from the book by C.J. Skuse, Sweetpea works because Purnell does her best to make Rhiannon as mousy as possible before she explodes in a fit of violence against a the poor schnook who didn’t see her before peeing in her vicinity.
During the first half of the first episode, we were a bit incredulous that Purnell could be playing someone who was that invisible. Yes, it’s a bit of a shallow thing to think about, but given her huge expressive eyes, it would seem to be impossible to think of anyone who looks like her to be someone who is completely ignored.
But that just emphasizes how good Purnell is in the role. As things keep happening to Rhiannon, including little things like the funeral director at her dad’s service not pronouncing her name correctly, the more her manner becomes anxious and the smaller she physically seems. In addition, she certainly conveys the anxious feeling of being around your high school bully as an adult, with the parasocial relationship that it involves: You’ve got deep anger and resentment for the bully for how the person affected your life, and the bully barely remembers you existed.
We’re not quite sure where the show will go from here. It feels like Rhiannon will go after Julia, but that might not be the case. We do know that she’s going to find out about the random guy she killed. But we’re certainly curious enough about Rhiannon’s transformation to keep watching.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Covered in blood, Rhiannon looks in the mirror and roars just like her father told her to.
Sleeper Star: Nicôle Lecky is delightfully obnoxious as Julia, who’s just as much of a bully in adulthood as she was as a teenager. We also like how smarmy Jeremy Swift is as Rhiannon’s boss Norman, who calls her “Sweetpea” because he likely doesn’t remember her name.
Most Pilot-y Line: Rhiannon’s last interaction with her father is way too full of irony; it feels like something that’s written instead of something that would happen in real life.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Sweetpea benefits from Ella Purnell transforming herself into a shrinking violent, but it’s also pretty funny when it examines just how invisible Rhiannon is.
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, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
