Something strange happens by the end of the HBO series Landscapers, about a British husband and wife who were convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison: You wind up swooning. Never has the story of a couple who killed the wife’s parents been so romantic.
I say romantic, not romanticized. A Bonnie and Clyde-esque portrait of how crime is a libido-driving intoxicant has definitely been done before, and acts of violence have certainly been fetishized in pop culture—in fact, almost incessantly.
But there’s something entirely new about the approach writer-director Ed Sinclair takes in telling the story of Susan and Christopher Edwards, an unassuming, dowdy, blue-collar couple who worked together to murder Susan’s parents and then bury the bodies in the back garden. Landscapers upends all expectations and tropes when it comes to what’s become the most popular genre on television: true crime and murder mysteries.
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Playing with form, nostalgia, and Hollywood homage, Sinclair cracks open a character study that dismantles the tenets of TV’s obsession with crime stories. Despite the dark undercurrent of the subject matter and the notes of black comedy throughout, he’s made a series that is astonishingly poetic and beautiful. In a strange way, it might be the year’s greatest love story.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Monday night’s finale of the series shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was. Not only is Susan and Christopher’s story Googleable, but a title card at the start of each episode “spoils,” so to speak, their fate. “In 2014 Susan and Christopher Edwards were convicted of murder and sentenced to a minimum of 25 years in prison,” it reads. “To this day they maintain their innocence.”
The finale centered around their trial, with counselors debunking the couple's defense and arguing that they had worked together to shoot and kill William and Patricia Wycherley in retaliation for them taking some of Susan’s inheritance. But we knew from the very first moments of the first episode that they’d be found guilty.
The already unbelievable details of the story were certainly enough to provide intrigue for four episodes, with each twist, turn, and revelation as gruesome and devastating as you might expect. It’s the experimental nature in the way that story is told—at once whimsical, inventive, and grim—that builds the final episode into its thrilling, unusual climax. Again, we know Susan and Christopher have been found guilty. But, by virtue of Sinclair’s avant-garde storytelling, we see them riding off into the sunset, like the classic Hollywood movie stars the characters have spent the series idolizing.
While given every chance to break and betray each other, this version of Susan and Christopher (played by Olivia Colman and David Thewlis) remain fastidiously loyal, both to their partner and to their account of what happened. It asks for a somewhat grotesque level of remove to do so, but when you see them sentenced together as a couple, it’s a touching reminder of how these lovers have become one. The ride off into the sunset is perhaps a fantasy sequence, wish fulfillment, or an interpretation of what’s really going on: Like everything else in their life, they’re heading into this next stage, as despairing as it is, together.
Throughout the series, Susan craves escapism from reality. She achieves that by turning to the movies: an obsession with Old Hollywood that consumes her life and, when she becomes addicted to purchasing film artifacts, autographs, and paraphernalia, ruins their finances. It’s a clever trick, then, to have Susan and Christopher’s saga play out in stylized cinematic homage to classic genres.
Given the astonishing nature of their crime, a straightforward telling would be captivating enough. Seizing on Susan’s film obsession in this way does more than just open things up visually. (Monday’s finale, for example, used a classic Western motif to dramatize how Susan and Christopher allegedly hid the bodies, and the trial is filmed like a throwback black-and-white courtroom drama.) It also adds a certain insight into both her and Christopher’s psyches. It makes a point that, in order to survive the enormity of what they had done, perhaps they had to create a romanticized world of shared delusion. Perhaps their lives had been so ordinary and, in many respects, so painful that the only way to thrive was to dream in the language of film. We spend the series trying to decipher whether or not Susan and Christopher are telling the truth. These sequences are a provocative gambit, then. Maybe the truth doesn’t matter as much as a good story.
All of this only works because Colman and Thewlis are so clued into these characters and their emotions that they’re able to ground the absurdity. In Colman’s performance, you feel Susan’s desperation to stay in her flight of fancy—a cinematic world of black-and-white heroes, villains, and happy endings—and her devastation every time she’s made to feel the weight of her reality again.
Thewlis matches that with the assuredness of Christopher’s devotion. “I never felt like I had to leave the real world behind to be with you,” he says. “If anything, Susan, you are what made the world feel real to me.” It’s beautiful. It’s romantic. But again, is it true?
The break in traditional form makes for a fascinating deconstruction of that question in terms of how these “did-they-do-it?” series typically play out. Not only are we whisked away through sweeping genre set pieces, but the show also frequently breaks the fourth wall.
Monday’s finale, especially, does this. We see the hair and makeup room, where Colman’s wigs are waiting on mannequin heads. We see Colman enter a set to begin filming, the camera and lights set up in front of her. During the sequence in the series when the investigators present their version of events, proving Susan and Christopher’s apparent lies, the actors walk from set to set, interacting as actors, not characters, as they prepare to act out the scenarios.
There’s a moment in the finale when, during a fantasy piece, Thewlis as Christopher as a pioneer cowboy takes off the wig he’s wearing, adding another meta level of alt-reality. Especially when it comes to true crime, where there are people being accused and asked to defend themselves, it raises the question of how much of what you see and are being told is real, and how much of it is performance.
It reminds us of the role that storytellers have in these kinds of series. They can make the audience see what they want them to see, believe what they want them to believe, and form opinions about people—about truths—based on how they choose to show events: the tone, the style, the perspective.
And then there's that title card that pops up in each episode, reminding us not just that the Edwards were convicted, but that they still maintain their innocence. While certainly sympathetic to its lead characters, Landscapers doesn’t answer the question of whether Susan and Christopher really committed the crime in any definitive manner. But in terms of this kind of narrative being told on television, it makes a great point about how a story like theirs can be manipulated by the people who are telling it and how.
It all amounts to a four-episode series that certainly was not perfect, but was maybe something even more valuable: finally new and exciting.
