Crucial to the success of any thriller is that the viewer can imagine themselves in the same situation as the lead characters.
A small bit of suspended belief might be required but Playing Nice does a fair job in this story of children swapped at birth.
Based on a novel by JP Delaney, it has a terrible dilemma at its core.
What would you do if you found out your three-year-old son’s real parents lived in the same town and they had your biological child?
The Rileys (Maddie who owns a successful fish restaurant and Pete, a stay-at-home dad) are blissfully unaware of what’s coming as they raise Theo on the idyllic Cornwall coast.
Maddie had post-natal depression, and a severe mental health incident is hinted at. Pete is slightly resentful that he had to give up his journalism career to take care of Theo and now that the three-year-old is in nursery, he’s taken a part-time landscaping job.
But these are common problems and the Rileys are good, caring parents.
Nonetheless, their world is rocked one afternoon by a call from the hospital and an admission that two premature babies had been swapped and left the hospital with the wrong parents.
DNA testing quickly confirms this and with their heads still spinning there’s a knock on the door and a friendly, similarly aged man is introducing himself as ‘Paul’s’ dad.
Paul is the Rileys’ biological son and lives in a stunning cliff top house with architect Miles and former artist Lucy.
The problem came to light, it seems, when Miles and Lucy felt that David had developmental problems and got him tested to see if it was something genetic.
Miles starts off as friendly, but we quickly establish that there’s something sinister about him, while Lucy seems afraid and bullied.
However, the first meeting overlooking the waves through the floor to ceiling glass of Miles’s house goes well.
The couples agree to keep the boys they have thus far raised and to build relationships with their biological sons. They will work closely together and also join forces to sue the hospital.
All goes well at first with Lucy agreeing to mind Theo after he has a problem in nursey and Miles offering to share, and pay for, his nanny to look after the two boys. All the better for the ‘brothers’ to get to know each other.
So far so good, but then Miles becomes more pressing with his requests to see Theo and Paul never seems available for Maddie to meet her birth son.
Things turn ugly after the Rileys are caught in an elaborate lie about why they can’t go on a trip away with Miles and Lucy to their holiday cottage in Norfolk.
Within hours legal papers are served on them, with Miles and Lucy giving notice that they want custody of both children, citing Maddie’s mental health problems and drinking and Pete’s ‘anger issues’.
After some soul searching, the Rileys decide that Miles is dangerous and they also seek legal custody of the two children.
The final two episodes will be broadcast on UTV on Sunday and Monday, but all four are available to stream on ITVx.
Playing Nice is a hell of a lot better than the early reviews would have you believe.
There are a few cliches and the script could have been more subtle about Miles’s controlling tendencies, but I suspect most people will find Playing Nice an entertaining psychological thriller about an almost impossible situation and a gut wrenching decision.
