TV review: Malice is simply too nice to be truly thrilling

Malice starring David Duchovny and Jack Whitehall

Malice (Prime Video) is too nice to be thrilling.

This isn’t just because it stars Jack Whitehall as Adam, an evil tutor who inveigles his way into the life of the wealthy Tanner family, when he joins them on their holiday in Greece to teach a bit of history.

Whitehall is usually the pleasant romcom hero with a few moments of punchable smugness. Is it possible to turn him into a creepy villain to match Matt Damon in The Talented Mr Ripley? Not here anyway.

But that’s not the main problem with this lavish six-parter that fits into the “rich people with problems” slot genre that we’re stuck with now thanks to White Lotus.

The issue is that it takes ages to feel like a thriller. We know things end badly because we’re told in the opening sequence that something terrible happened to the Tanner family and that the father, Jamie, deserved whatever Adam apparently dished out.

But after that, it’s a lot of time watching the Tanners and friends being happy families.

At one point, Adam tells the nanny that he would like to gut her and hang her on the washing line, but it looks thrown in there to remind us that this is supposed be a dark psychological thriller rather than an over-priced ad for a holiday in Greece. 

A few minutes later, he poisons her with an avocado salad, presumably so he’ll get hired as the Tanners’s nanny and trigger the access he needs to wreak his revenge.

These feel like clips from a totally different show. There is no single tone to this, nothing creepy or jarring to draw you in.

The best of this is David Duchovny as Jamie Tanner. He’s utterly believable as the charming bully, who loves his wife and kids as long as they give him his way.

The problem is, I don’t know who to shout for. 

Something terrible has obviously happened to Adam in the past, but Whitehall doesn’t have the range or, in fairness, the script, to make you feel sorry for him. We’re told in the blurb that it’s Jamie and the Tanners who are in danger, but we’re still waiting for something bad to happen to them halfway through episode two.

This would make a decent romcom series. They could have kept all the cast, changed the story slightly and renamed it as Love on the Island.

It would have made a lot more sense than a show called Malice, with very little malice.