Riviera, Sky Atlantic review - codswallop on the Côte d'Azur

W Somerset Maugham, who knew a thing or two about the dark side, summed up the Riviera as “a sunny place for shady people”. On the evidence of this first episode, Riviera is a funny place for shitty people.

The first few minutes flung us between London, Monaco and New York. Bright lights, big titties. The connection between money and sex was made straight away – and in the case of Christos Clios (Dimitri Leonidas, pictured below) in doggy style. Talking about money in Canary Wharf – “there is nothing more rigorous” – turns him on. According to him, the unregulated international art market represents the “last Wild West”.

While his stepmother Georgina (Julia Stiles) tried to buy an abstract daub for $30 million in New York, her husband Constantine (Anthony La Paglia: Without a Trace, The Code), back in Monaco, made the mistake of attending a party on a Russian oligarch’s super-yacht. Before he could follow a topless trollop into the Med, the vessel exploded. There is only one (female) survivor.

It takes a certain kind of courage (or commercial death-wish) to kill off your star in the first 10 minutes – and it is a shame to see so little of the ever-reliable Matthew Marsh (who must have been boosting his pension fund and brushing up his Russian accent by playing the ill-starred oligarch). Stiles made a great impression as Lumen Ann Pierce in season five of Dexter – and is familiar from the Bourne franchise – but here, looking like a bargain-basement Sharon Stone or a Britney (on a good day) lookalike – she lacks the presence to make us follow her through nine more episodes as she discovers what a dirty, double-dealing scoundrel she married just one year ago.

Lena Olin (Vinyl, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) adds a touch of class to the proceedings as Constantine’s serpentine ex-wife (below): “There’s only so much sympathy one can take.” Her other son, Adam, is played by Iwan Rheon. It’s just weird seeing Ramsay Bolton (from Game of Thrones) in modern clothes. Adrian Lester and Nicholas Rowe can add very little to a cast full of Euro-nobodies. The brilliant Phil Davis is due to appear soon, but he won’t be able to salvage a lamentable script that might as well have been written on gossamer. There is zero substance to it.

As a long-time admirer of Neil Jordan’s work, I find it hard to believe he is responsible for this froth. How can a writer and director whose credits include Angel, The Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game and The End of the Affair stoop so low? It must be financial pressure rather than creative burn-out. That said, he did manage to make The Borgias boring (the original 1981 series is a masterpiece in comparison), but he has been helped by no less a writer than the Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville on this episode of Riviera. Perhaps, like Constantine Clios, they just took the money and ran.

A self-harming daughter and a dreary funeral were no compensation for one big bang and some pretty coastal scenery (complete, in one long shot, with burning bush fires). There was a motorcycle chase that would disgrace any Bond movie and the discovery of a Beretta in the dead man’s fuck-pad that Georgina clearly doesn’t know how to use.

“It’s been too long…”; “Do not trust anyone…”; “You broke my heart…” The Good Lord help us. If it’s clichés you’re after, Emmerdale, for one, serves them up with better acting every week-night.

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