Botched crimes and blown minds: TV comes Full Circle in its hallucinogen era

Australia may have become the first country in the world to legalise the use of psychedelics for medicinal purposes but the latest Steven Soderbergh miniseries will mess with your mind more.

Thriller doyenne Claire Danes and Zazie Beetz are brilliant in the new Full Circle. Photo: HBO

Claire Danes is back. And at her Homeland best, except this time she’s borrowing heavily from her Romeo & Juliet era, starring as a pampered, privileged Park Avenue princess. As Sam, a “nepo baby” of culinary royalty, who works for her ­famous chef father – played by Dennis Quaid as pony-tailed Chef Jeff. In fair New York City, where we lay our scene for Full ­Circle. From not so ancient grudge break to new mutiny based on one woman’s woo woo. Where civil blood makes civil – and those of illegally trafficked kids – unclean. Do with their death bury their parents’ strife.

And yet Steven Soderbergh’s new project is less Shakespeare than Hitchcock.

Full Circle is a limited-run noir with ingredients that include ethical drama, capitalistic censure and thriller elements.

Written by El Solomon, who previously worked with Soderbergh in 2021 on the film No Sudden Move, this new series is about a botched kidnapping, which, as it turns out, makes for more stress and anxiety for the viewer.

Danes’s Sam and her husband Derek (Timothy Olyphant) are on the payroll of Chef Jeff and are raising a teenage son Jared (Ethan Stoddard) who has the memory of a sieve and keeps losing his stuff – an iPhone, a designer sweater he lined up to buy, limited-edition sneakers.

Jared, like most of his species of teenager, is monosyllabic except with a kid he’s met online who claims to have his “stuff”. They agree to meet up one night when Derek and Sam are out and when they return home Jared’s snuck out and been kidnapped – something his parents learn when they receive a phone call telling them their child will be killed if a massive ransom isn’t paid in short order.

Dennis Quaid stars in the new Binge series Full Circle, in a role we've never seen him in before. Photo: HBO

Thankfully Chef Jeff is on deck to stump up the “$314,159” ransom, which he acquires from his casino mates. But not ­before Jared appears. And herein the viewer reaches for the Valium, while Full Circle kicks into gear. The dumb-criminals trope in Full Circle is used heavily but instead of for comedic effect, the narrative arc is dark, dramatic and downright terrifying.

As Derek and Sam realise a stranger has been abducted, thus making it no longer their problem, the crims who snatched the poor kid (warning: bolt cutters are involved), are none the wiser of their mix up.

Moral issues are rampant in the first couple of episodes. The rich, white couple is involved in trying to save a stranger who a bunch of other young people have ensnared in the quagmire – one that was created by a mob boss character who believes in witchcraft and practises it. Cruelly. All of this is over trying to break some “curse” which is teased out over the course of the series.

The criminal gang includes young people brought in from Georgetown under false pretences who have to work to “pay off their debts” by becoming skinny standover men all the while grappling with their own conscience and station in a life as an alien in a foreign land. The order for nabbing Jared has come from Ms Mahabir (played by CCH Pounder), who runs her operation with gambling debt-riddled right-hand man Garmen (Phaldut Sharma), nephew Aked (Jharrel Jerome), and a group of kids including Xavier (Sheyi Cole) and his friend Louis (Gerald Jones), whose sister Natalia (Adia) is Mahabir’s masseuse.

Mahabir is convinced that kidnapping rich kid Jared will ­alleviate a longstanding curse upon her family caused by her dead husband.

She wants to close the metaphorical “circle”. Those who are numerically minded will noticed the ransom fee is a riff on Pi and the transaction is scheduled to take place in a chalk-outlined circle in Washington Square Park. Add to this chaos an ambitious postal officer who wants to be promoted and so involves herself in the case despite being told to stick to her knitting by her disinterested boss.

What Full Circle teaches us is that a (fictional) kidnapping gone awry is actually more stressful than a successful operation.

However it makes for wonderful viewing. Since Succession has departed our streaming line-ups, Full Circle fits the bill for those craving some prestigious television with a stellar cast and suspense.

                       ■ ■ ■

As a palate cleanser, albeit one that is still just as trippy, try the sleeper hit Slip. It’s like Sex and the City if Carrie had a personality.

“I wanted to make a comedy but I didn’t want to shy away from the depths of despair,” said creator and actor Zoe Lister- Jones. She wrote all seven episodes of a series that would become Slip, during one of the many Covid lockdowns.

She’s not only the series’ writer, but also its director and star. Lister-Jones plays Mae, a woman whose life and marriage are just fine, but not amazing. “A Brooklyn whirlwind of museums and cool shoes and wondering if she should have a baby”, is how Vogue described it.

Zoe Lister Jones "found the multiverse in her vagina" while writing and starring in her new series, The Slip. Photo: Binge.

Mae sleeps with another man on impulse, and when she wakes up, discovers that she’s somehow married to him.

It’s not a “crazy night in Vegas” scenario – she soon realises that she’s dropped into another life every time she orgasms. Or, as she gravely intones in one episode, “I think my p…y is a wormhole.”

The absurdist premise leads to both hilarity and darkness, but Lister-Jones is proud of putting a woman’s sexual awakening at the centre of the story, allowing Mae to be “at the helm of her own sexual pleasure rather than it being necessarily about the other people”, as she told Vanity Fair.

It’s a niche concept with a quirky cast of fresh faces. If you like Bridgerton, you’ll love this. It’s got the melodrama of a period drama with more attitude and sass than Jane’s Addiction and Jane Austen combined.

Both Full Circle and Slip are moreish.

You’ll have one bite then keep running back for more, if only to see where it all ends.

Full Circle is streaming now on Binge
Slip is streaming now on Binge