Playing Nice is bland, generic porridge that buries potential for a good human thriller

James Norton – who seems trapped on ITV when, by rights, he should be a movie star – provides a lacklustre performance

Kids can be a handful, right? From The Omen to The Midwich Cuckoos, film and television loves to show the disconnect between parents and progeny. But what if that dynamic was shaped, not by some demonic force, but by an apparent administrative error? That’s the question posed by ITV’s new four-part drama, Playing Nice, which follows two families navigating the total upending of their domestic lives.

Pete (James Norton) and Maddie (Niamh Algar) live a seemingly idyllic life in Cornwall with their young son Theo. Idyllic, that is, until they get word from the hospital: Theo might not be their biological son. It seems that there was a switch-up during his difficult birth, meaning that they swapped babies with another couple, Miles (James McArdle) and Lucy (Jessica Brown Findlay).

“With your cooperation we will get to the bottom of this,” a hospital goon tells the couple. And they do cooperate – they play nice, so to speak – engaging with the other family, and agreeing to an arrangement where all four parents are involved in both children’s lives. But these are uncharted waters, and things rapidly begin to disintegrate.

What begins as an elevator pitch to traumatise new parents becomes an examination of wealth and the legal system. Miles is some entrepreneurial bigwig, living in a vast modernist mansion overlooking the sea (which allows for barbs like “you know what they say about people in glass houses”), with the resources to fight both the hospital, first, and then the other couple. Can he simply bulldoze his way into sole custody of both the boys? Will he destroy Pete and Maddie’s relationship in the process? Or is this charismatic bloke with the big house hiding a darker purpose?

The fact that the show is based on a novel by JP Delaney, whose books, like The Perfect Wife and The Girl Before, have always proven successful potboilers, ought to give you some sense of where this is going. While the set-up sounds plausible and sickening – baby mix-ups do happen, infrequently, in hospitals, and have been the source of documentaries and TV series in the past – the show quickly slips into the thriller genre.

The creeping improbability of the storyline ought to be indicated by the fact that Pete and Maddie are depicted as too poor to challenge Miles, despite owning and operating the trendiest restaurant in Cornwall, and too stupid to ever think to, you know, hire a lawyer. Instead, the show leans into its narrative daftness to ratchet up the tension.

A few years ago, it seemed like the murder mystery might be having a renaissance. Spurred on by Knives Out, the classic whodunnit – a self-contained, logical case unfolding under a detective’s microscope – felt like it scratched a psychological itch. But that trend has been rapidly superseded on TV by the rambling, illogical mystery-cum-thriller genre, almost all of which are adapted from bestselling airport books.

James Norton as Pete in the new four-part drama (ITV)

It’s not just Delaney’s work (The Girl Before was also adapted for the BBC), but that of other authors like Harlan Coben (Missing You, Fool Me Once, The Stranger), Liane Moriarty (Big Little Lies, Nine Perfect Strangers, Apples Never Fall), Elin Hildebrand (The Perfect Couple), Louise Doherty (Apple Tree Yard), Sarah Vaughan (Anatomy of a Scandal), Jean Hanff Korelitz (The Undoing), Celeste Ng (Little Fires Everywhere)… I could go on.

Somehow these shows are all aesthetically identical, despite different plots and locations. Playing Nice’s director, Kate Hewitt, and writer, Grace Ofori-Attah, relocate the action from London to the South West, turning the Cornish Riviera into a seaside idyll to match Monterey or Nantucket. 

Everything feels glossy and anonymised, even the central couple. Norton – who seems trapped on ITV when, by rights, he should be a movie star – provides a lacklustre performance (“Go girl give us nothing!”), while Algar is offered little more than the opportunity to look worried (a seemingly contagious condition: Brown Findlay’s Lucy has also contracted it). Only McArdle, as the menacing Miles, seems to be having any fun. “Be careful, be very, very careful,” he growls in a thick Glaswegian accent that’s at odds with Norton’s intermittent attempts at a Cornish lilt.

Once Playing Nice has drifted from its nightmarish premise into this bland, generic porridge, it loses both its tension and its purpose. It’s a shame, because there’s a good human thriller buried in there, about the interpersonal challenges of unriddling an unthinkable situation. But what we get, instead, is another whiplash-inducing, overripe shock fest, which privileges handbrake turns over steady handling.