Suddenly it's the 1990s again.
Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny have just announced that The X Files is coming back and, on Sky, there's a new Italian drama called 1992 (Sky Arts 1, Tuesday, 10pm). This was the year Italy had an economic and moral nervous breakdown that exposed a network of corruption in the Italian state, and the makers of the drama summon up the period with a strikingly grey, washed-out atmosphere. The whole thing looks like it's been lit by one solitary flickering strip light: skin is pale, eyes are grey, hearts are black.
The first episode is also striking for another reason. It starts out like any other police drama when an officer called Luca Pastore (Domenico Diele) arrives at the police HQ where men are grumpy and the air is three-parts nicotine, but it then rapidly uses a succession of different styles. Some of it is shot like Mad Men, some like 2001: A Space Odyssey; other parts feel like a documentary on street crime, or a Nirvana video, or a porn film. It's a mix of styles that's bewildering and unsettling but mesmerising too.
The fact that a drama like 1992 is on primetime British TV is also a sign of some gratifying trends. The first is that subtitled foreign shows are now taken for granted as a central part of TV drama in the UK; the second is that Italian drama is undergoing a renewal worldwide. The recent Mafia drama Gomorrah was a hit in more than 100 countries and one of its writers, Ludovica Rampoldi, has also written 1992 and says she would like it to further boost the revival of interest in Italian television.
One of the more obvious reasons it may do so is there is some pretty liberated Italian nudity right from the word go: the opening shot is of naked male bottom and about 10 minutes in there is a free-spirited sex scene that you wouldn't normally see on British or American TV. But the sex and nudity is part of a bigger, more subtle narrative: the reason we see a naked male bottom at all is because Luca Pastore is examining his body for the first signs of HIV and, as the corruption spreads through the Italian state, so we keep returning to Luca looking for signs of the infection spreading through his body. It's just one of the metaphors that fill the first episode: banknotes swirling in a toilet, a greedy wild boar on the rampage, and so on.
If there is a criticism to be made, it is that the first episode is very male-centric and the female characters tend to appear only when they are having sex with men or crying over them. I hope this is fixed in later episodes; I also hope this series encourages more interest in the 1990s as a source of interesting drama. Compared to the 1970s and 1980s, the 1990s are rather neglected by dramatists, but the makers of 1992 have understood their potential. The 1970s was the decade of colour and the 1980s was the decade of excess. But the 1990s was the comedown, the bill, the dark epilogue, and there's much more of its story to be told.
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