The thought of going days and days without sleep is enough to make eyelids start to droop, but Vicky McClure makes the whole exhausted ordeal seem even worse than it might sound in her new thriller Insomnia.
McClure plays high-powered family lawyer Emma Averill, who's on the brink of making partner at her law firm with her 40th birthday weeks away. But ringing in four decades also triggers a bout of intense sleeplessness, in which she begins to think her mental health is deteriorating in the same way her mother's did around the milestone.
That's not the only thing on Emma's plate. Her free-wheeling sister Phoebe (Leanne Best) has suddenly returned from travels abroad. Her stereotypically obnoxious teenager Chloe (India Fowler) says annoying things like "it was only a bit of coke" when she gets busted for drugs.
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Then there's Emma's work as a custody lawyer, which is coming up against her hopes of making partner. And the show starts with her estranged mother being admitted to hospital after a violent episode.
Sarah Pinborough's adaptation of her novel of the same name is very much what it says on the tin. Across the six episodes of Insomnia, we see plenty of McClure's Emma tossing and turning, or lying eerily still in bed with eyes wide awake, or occasionally shooting envious looks at her slumbering husband Robert (Tom Cullen) beside her.
But it's when Emma gets up from bed in the wee hours that things begin to go really awry, as she enters nightly fugue states and runs amok in their ginormous house.
Emma cycles through a set of night-time rituals that in any other context would be the makings of a perfect evening of self-care: running a bath, lighting candles, putting on music.
During these sleepwalking spells Emma also begins to terrorise her son Will (Smylie Bradwell), much in the same way her own mother did her.
McClure and the show are solid at capturing the state of increasing out-of-focus delirium brought on by endless nights of fitful sleep. But these fugue states begin to feel more like a series of creepy things happening one after another – particularly once Emma installs cameras around the house and scenes unfold in the grainy black and white of CCTV in various rooms – rather than a clearly woven story that's going somewhere.
The very serious-minded drama grasps at the straws of motherhood, women aging and childhood trauma, but there just isn't much there there. Insomnia feels most comfortable playing in the paddling pool of soapy storylines, rather than sinking into the deep waters of those Big Themes.
The show is particularly lazy in its gritty flashback scenes to Emma and Phoebe as children. The lurid fisheye interstitials have an unpleasant aura of poverty porn to them, as the sisters fearfully peer through staircase spindles at their mentally unwell mother.
The performances are good across the board, overcoming some very ridiculous plot points.
McClure is fantastic as a terribly successful woman in her terribly lovely house with her terribly nice husband, very suddenly losing a grip on things. Her performance of sleeplessness even manages to overcome her razor-sharp bone structure's refusal to ever look tired.
As a middle-of-the-road thriller, Insomnia is a great watch with a predictably bonkers late-season twist and a spooky enough cliffhanger ending that leaves open the possibility for more. It just needs to realise that's what it is, instead of taking itself so seriously.
Insomnia streams on Paramount+ from May 23.
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Previously Deputy TV Editor at Digital Spy and, before that, a TV Reporter at The Mirror, Rebecca can now be found crafting expert analysis of the TV landscape, when she's not talking on the BBC or Times Radio about everything from the latest season of Bridgerton or The White Lotus to whatever chaos is unfolding in the various Love Island villas. When she's not bingeing a boxset, in-the-wild sightings of Rebecca have included stints on the National TV Awards and BAFTAs red carpets, and post-match video explainers of the reality TV we're all watching.
