In a summer of strong new series that now include “The Leftovers,” “The Strain,” The Divide” and “Tyrant” and the return of “The Bridge,” “The Killing” and “Rectify,” the one that may soar above them all is “The Honorable Woman” (Sundance, 9 p.m.), a handsome, taut, eight-episode mini series that couldn’t be more timely as it takes on the world’s chief trouble spots.
It stars Maggie Gyllenhall as an English daughter whose father, a gun-runner to ISrael, was killed in her presence as a child and who has led the family business to a more reconciliatory spot where she helps Palestinians when she can. The intrigue follows from there in a show that, like some of the best series on TV this year, from “True Detective” to “Fargo,” is written by one person in one voice, Hugo Blick, the writer and director whose earlier work has included the British series “Sensitive Skin” and “The Shadow Line.”
Gyllenhall turns in a role so strong and captivating, it not only elevates television, it may be the best role she’s ever played. (She also has an impeccable English accent). But her nuance may to some degree be due to how she was written.
In making “The Honorable Woman,” Blick told reporters at the TV Critics Association summer press tour earlier this month, “I was interested primarily in taking and looking essentially at a woman who stood on a world stage and suggested that she had an engagement in the idea of reconciliation and in an environment in which a conflict had been ongoing and appears to be intractable.
“I’m fascinated by the public and private display of character and that if a woman stands for it or a character stands as a leader on a world stage and says, ‘I want to go this way to try and effect this thing,’ I’m intrigued at the vacuum, in a strange way, that may exist in that personality that needs to take a world stage position because they are disorientated about themselves. So, in a strange way, they’re looking outwards; they’re not looking inwards. And so that gave me the construction of an idea of the psychology of the character who was willing to go one direction and risk her own life in taking that direction, partly because she has yet failed to engage in the psyche of her own soul. So that was the beginning of it.”
Gyllenhaal, who so brilliantly plays the woman says her character’s focuses “on what’s happening outside of her, [but] it becomes impossible pretty quickly for her to ignore what’s going on inside her.”
I asked them about the specifics of the conflict in the series that are strikingly being played out during the current increase of conflict.
Blick, who says he has a lifelong interest in travel and the region, said when he wrote the teleplay 18 months ago, “it was a quiet time. It was relatively peaceful. The knowledge is that it got so quiet that people forget that it exists. And it is cyclical, and it has now tragically become this hotspot yet again. And this will abate, and then it will happen again. So the idea is that of its cycle was something that I was engaged in, though no one could have predicted that this would happen at this time.”
Not that “The Honorable Woman” has a solution — two state or not. “This show does in no way try to say, ‘There’s a problem here that we feel we can engage and solve.'” Blick says.
“There was a security officer in Israel who said, ‘You know, when we get into these situations, we’re screaming at each other, across the table,'” Blick recounted. “‘But if we’re really doing our jobs, underneath the table we’re reaching our hands across and trying to touch fingertips all the time.’ The position of this show is ultimately that, as when these conflicts are happening, the idea of reconciliation should never leave the table. And that’s the purpose of the piece.”
Gyllenhaal said reaction to the work in London, where it started about a month ago, has been different than it’s been here. “It was interesting to sort of feel the difference in the way that people think and talk about the Middle East there,” she said. “Here, my impression is that people want to think about what’s happening over there, and they want to talk about it, and that there isn’t a lot of space to do that. And I wonder, I guess, I hope that maybe this show at this moment will open up an hour of time where you can put your mind in that region. And the show does not say, ‘This is what we think is right. This is what we think is wrong.’ Instead, I think it actually really truly asks the person who is watching it to think about what they think is right and they think is wrong.”
At its core, Blick says, “The Honorable Woman” is a thriller. “It’s absolutely a story that makes you the detective. It presents an idea, and you’re asked to hold onto that idea and think about it.”
But, he adds, as “You’re still engaging yourself in a thriller, but you’re also engaging in ideas,” he says. “And that’s really important because you start to engage in both sides of that terrain.”
Producer Greg Brenman says that though it exists “in the context of that huge political landscape, it’s an intensely personal piece, actually.”
But, Blick adds, “because it is a miniseries, it has a completion. And it’s really important to see the whole thing.”
“The Honorable Woman” continues with eight episodes that start tonight.