Boring is as good as this erotic drama gets: Netflix’s Obsession reviewed

It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing itself as ‘erotic’ is in fact deeply boring. Unfortunately, faced with Netflix’s four-part Obsession, the b-word is hard to avoid – the twist in this case being that boring was as good as the series got. The rest of the time it alternated between the inept, the infuriating and the utterly mystifying – and not just because you could never fathom what on earth the characters thought they were up do.

How, for instance, did so much money and talent get wasted on a show that the people involved with must surely have realised was terrible? And did the makers really think that we’d put up with any amount of humourless tosh just for the sake of some sex and nudity? (Not, admittedly, that my 15-year-old self would have had a problem.)

For what it’s worth, here’s the basic plot – at which point I might have issued a spoiler alert if Obsession hadn’t come pre-spoiled.