TV review: The Beautiful Lie, episode 2, ABC (2015)

Deeply in love, Anna and Skeet take a walk in the street near Anna's house in the middle of the night. Then they go for a drive in Skeet's old Volvo. They sit on the bonnet and Skeet initiates Anna into the rarefied world of listening to random night sounds - as a musician, Skeet is well qualified to advise his lover - and in the morning Anna wakes up in her own bed, next to her husband. The night becomes just a memory except for the cable tie Skeet put on Anna's wrist during the midnight walk. There it is in the morning, resting with her arm on her sheet.

The two meet by accident at a celebrity auction a few nights later and the subterfuge comes crumbling down around Anna's ears when she and Skeet are arrested for using cocaine - which Dolly had found among Kingsley' s belongings - in the electrical room of the house the auction is taking place in. Incensed, Xander confronts Anna with the evidence of her adultery and Anna knows she can never give up Skeet. The episode ends with Anna lying down in the darkened bedroom of her son, alongside the sleeping child.

Meanwhile, Peter tries to have it off with a neighbour and lucks out, and Kitty absconds from the detox institution she has been immured in.

Episode two of The Beautiful Lie is less elegaic than the first episode, lacking some of the strength of Dolly's first explosion and some of the calm of Anna's initial romance. I stopped watching last night halfway through and went to bed because I was tired, then caught the remainder of the show this morning on iview. There's something insipid in the deliberate way the direction takes the action in this episode that was missing in the first ep. I'm not sure what it was but it might just be that everyone had got tired of their roles, or the directors were not entirely convinced by the storyline. Still, the show maintains its ability to entertain. The scenes with Kitty in the sanatorium were unconvincing probably because it was not clear which way her story would play out. We'll have to see next week if she goes back to Peter or not (I saw a trailer, and she does go to his place).