Despite the lack of sex, stick with it: Paramount Plus’s Fatal Attraction reviewed

With the current taste for remakes of erotic-thriller movies of the 1980s and ’90s, these are certainly good times for TV intimacy co-ordinators. Just two weeks ago, we had Netflix’s Obsession. Now Paramount+ has come to the slightly weird party, turning the daddy of them all, Fatal Attraction, into an eight-part series.

In the original film, you may remember, high-flying married lawyer Dan Gallagher had an ill-advised weekend fling with Alex Forrest, who didn’t take him ending it terribly well. Instead she posed such an unhinged single-female threat to the nuclear family (and its pet rabbit) that cinema audiences famously cheered when Dan’s wife Beth did the decent thing and shot the mad cow dead.

Unsurprisingly, this isn’t quite how things are in the 21st-century version – where the first sign of a thorough plot overhaul came in the opening scene of the three episodes released so far. After 15 years in jail for Alex’s murder, a shaggy-headed Dan (Joshua Jackson) was up before a parole board where he accepted full responsibility for the crime and movingly expressed his remorse.

We then cut back to happier days for both him and his hair.