Non-standard narrative moves

From Lucy Mangan’s Grauniad review of Killing Eve:

This isn’t a retrograde step. This is progress. This is a stance that says we are at a point now where creators do not have to apologise for or drag in contemporary hot-button issues to justify writing about women. It can just be done. This is both what normalisation means and how it is consolidated.

It has struck me, watching this series, that it has in common with Jane Campion’s “Top of the Lake: China Girl” a certain fearlessness — not noisy taboo-busting iconoclasm, just a feeling of embracing the freedom to go where it wants to. The confidence to pull non-standard narrative moves, to be tonally goofy, to write in the knowing glances and gallows humour. It’s what you get when you move past “representation” and Mary Sue characterisation, and go “I’ve got Sandra Oh, Fiona Shaw and Jodie Comer to play with, and I’m going to write the shit out of this and let them really do their thing”.