"In Mick Herron's 2003 debut novel Down Cemetery Road, the first of his Zoë Boehm series, protagonist Sarah Trafford gets involved in a neighborhood mystery mainly because she is bored. At least, that's how people around her see it - stuck in her picture-perfect house in Oxford with no career to speak of and her marriage slowly falling apart, she wants to feel useful."
"Morwenna Banks's adaptation of the novel for Apple TV+, from the team behind Slow Horses (also adapted from Herron's work), puts Sarah (Ruth Wilson) in the present and liberates her from domesticity: Sarah is an art restorer who can tell which paintings were done by the old masters and which by their forgotten wives based on their tone of blue."
"Donning neck scarves, fuzzy sweaters, and Adidas sneakers, Sarah looks of a piece with her idyllic town. Biking home from work, she runs into a distracted little girl chasing a butterfly. Because she is a Working Woman preoccupied with Important Things, she has little talent for the domestic arts. She burns herself with her straightener and transfers a frozen lasagna from its cardboard container to a nice enamel baking dish and still manages to burn it."
Sarah Trafford is relocated to the present as an art restorer who can identify works by old masters and their overlooked wives from subtle blues. She is portrayed as professionally engaged and freed from domestic expectations, yet she retains awkwardness with household chores and social rituals. A chance encounter with a distracted child and tensions at a dinner party with her husband’s clients propel her into a neighborhood mystery. Social dynamics expose class and gender assumptions through friends with alternative lifestyles and an arrogant guest surprised by her employment.
Read at Vulture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]