The Hollowmen exceeded my expectations…which had been a modern day version of Yes Minister/ Yes Prime Minister. Of course there are definite echoes of these fine British comedies, but The Hollowmen is much more than satire on the machiavellian maneouvres of an apparently unbiased civil service. What I found in the first episode was a cutting and incisive dark comedy on the absolute failure of modern democratic governments. Policy-making and implementation becomes defined by increasingly futile gestures (awareness campaigns, meetings with “key stakeholders”) in the continuing and desperate search for a positive media response. Decisions are driven by ineffective polling and the ebbs and flows of the neverending news cycle. All is reaction…never action. The metaphorical absence of genuine leadership in contemporary politics is signalled by the literal absence of the Prime Minister in The Hollowmen. We never see him. (This was the original concept for The West Wing also but it didn’t eventuate there). Whether this conceit can be effectively maintained remains to be seen…but I enjoyed it in the first episode.

So is there a resonance with the Eliot poem….sure. The poor souls in The Hollowmen’s Central Policy Unit do indeed engage in plenty of “gesture without motion”. They are seemingly at the mercy of the machines of publicity and spin, which they rely on to produce the appearance of government, but are also beyond their control.

More please…