Chivalry review, Steve Coogan and Sarah Solemani

There is an unquestionable sense in which new Channel 4 series Chivalry, co-written by and co-starring Steve Coogan and Sarah Solemani, asked the question, “What if Alan Partridge were a successful Hollywood producer in the post-#MeToo era?” This question is worth asking, especially when the answers are as good and funny and deft as they are here.

Coogan played Cameron, a fairly very typical film producer. He was just coming out of another relationship with partner who was also his assistant. He has pictured some scenes with the leading lady and he is now trying to persuade to reshoot scenes from his latest project. And When Bobby (Solemani), the indie darling who has been brought in to detoxify the project which is poisoned by its European old-guard director, shouts “Sorry!” as she rushes off mid-conversation, call about her son comes through, he shouts back, “Never apologise for being a mother!”

If the portrait of a man applying limited intelligence to matters of deep import, here Chivalry plays to Coogan’s greatest power, it is still so much more. The program grew out of the real-life sparring over feminism and the it needed for change that went on between Coogan and Solemani when they were working on the 2019 film Greed, when the wave of the #MeToo movement began to break against Hollywood’s shores. Show is filled with complexity and nuance instead of didacticism or simple sat irisation of past excesses and the overcorrections that come with the new era.

Bobby welcome Cameron’s new assistant Ama on the intimate scene she has to reshoot, but moves swiftly on when Ama reckons it would be empowering to have leading lady be “a squirter”. She and Bobby unite later to embarrass Cameron as they rework the scene to make it s*** for women as well as men.

This is folded into the main theme, the tendency of power to corrupt. Cameron bemoans the introduction of compulsory intimacy supervisors on set. Bobby said, “Do you want to know why they’re compulsory now?”

“Because the men who had the power to stop women being abused chose not to. The environment created was just so hostile and toxic and predatory and disgusting that intimacy supervisors were created to spell out what should be obvious.”

Cameron said, “Right.”

Chivalry is a quality, precision-engineered piece of work by a pair with extraordinary chemistry, both on- and off-screen, in the writers’ room.