A cut above TV’s usual #MeToo fare: BBC1’s Rules of the Game reviewed

As you may have noticed, it’s something of a golden age for TV shows about how invisible middle-aged women are — except perhaps, in all those TV shows about how invisible middle-aged women are.

At first sight, Rules of the Game — a crime drama set in a northern sportswear company — seemed a fairly standard example. The company in question, Fly Dynamic, has a management style that some might consider a little sleazy, run as it is by a group of men who’ve never met a 16-year-old girl they didn’t want to ply with booze and drugs. Meanwhile their neglected wives amuse themselves as best they can with cheese evenings.

Luckily, these early signs that we were in for just another well-meaning but dramatically crude homily about toxic you-know-what proved deceptive. Granted, after two episodes, the blokes remain uniformly villainous. But in a rare and welcome twist, the female characters are pretty flawed too: to such an extent that if Thomas Middleton hadn’t already bagged it in the 17th century, the title Women Beware Women wouldn’t be a bad fit.