Tall Tales and Murder review – this Irish version of The Wire makes for mile-a-minute TV
You definitely won’t be bored by the TV take on the first of the Dublin Trilogy novels. But you might well feel confused by this Bonnie and Clyde-style caper through gangland Ireland (featuring Aidan Gillen)
Tall Tales and Murder is likely to elicit varied responses from viewers, but boredom will surely be low on the list. This Irish caper – based on the first of the Dublin Trilogy novels by Caimh McDonnell, and written for TV by Stuart Carolan – moves at a mile a minute, taking in disgruntled gangsters; a dysfunctional care home; buried treasure; bedroom cuckoldry; a Paul Mescal lookalike contest and much more. Billed as a Bonnie and Clyde-style escapade, there are hints of Channel 4’s offbeat hit The End of the F***ing World, BBC Scotland’s thriller Guilt, and even a less elaborate Da Vinci Code in this tale of ill-gotten, church-adjacent gains. It comes with much prestige attached, too: Carolan is the man behind Irish TV hit Love/Hate, and the series was co-created by Chris Addison of The Thick of It and Veep fame.
And yet, I’m still unsure that the above mix makes for particularly standout television. It’s entertaining, sure, but in the same way that whiling your day away on TikTok is entertaining, watching weird little vignettes while being hit with a continuous drip-feed of dopamine. Tall Tales and Murder pummels you with a multitude of characters, themes, plots, moods and twists, and feels like reading a choose-your-own-adventure book from cover to cover rather than skipping to the relevant pages. To watch is to gorge on an all-you-can-eat buffet of drama and comedy and action, but perhaps not to feel particularly satiated by any of it.
It starts out intriguingly enough, centring on Bridget (Ella Lily Hyland), a care home worker with miraculous levels of patience and something of a hoarding problem (“was Aladdin bipolar, too?” she wonders). She looks after the likes of ailing dementia patient Rose (Sheila Flitton) with dedication, love and the odd scary bedtime story, all while keeping herself regulated by getting high in her on-site lodgings. Aisling O’Sullivan is her no-nonsense matron boss, who – we learn – has an unconventional sexual arrangement with cop Bunny (Brian Doherty). It’s via Bunny that Bridget encounters local miscreant Paul (Casey Walsh), who is an unlikely addition to the care home’s night staff, in something of a change of pace from nicking cars. Sparks fly between the pair.
Where the wheels start to come off is when a mysterious John Doe at the home (Aidan Gillen) wakes from a coma and restarts an underworld feud over a cache of Celtic gold. Tall Tales and Murder has an initial strain of kookiness that appeals, in the same way that Small Prophets was uncanny and well observed. But this show aspires to more and – in doing so – becomes more overwrought with each of its six episodes. Carolan’s Love/Hate was sometimes described as the Irish answer to The Wire, and Gillen was actually in The Wire. And yet, Tall Tales and Murder’s attempts at gangland violence are by-the-numbers.
Somewhere deep down, there are the bones of something interesting here. Hyland and Walsh have brilliant chemistry as the co-workers turned treasure-hunters – her battling an addiction to pills and him to booze – and a plotline about Paul having been abused as a child is carefully handled. Flitton – who is 93 years old – is masterly as Rose, who believes she’s just seven. And Amandaland’s Philippa Dunne is on super scary form as leopard print-clad, eye-rolling gangster Ma Baker, even if we don’t see nearly enough of her.
But Tall Tales and Murder can’t see its central plot about stolen riches through without excess and self-indulgence, and is less compelling for it. The care home residents – seemingly a central part of Bridget and the matron’s lives – are quickly forgotten about in a way that feels truly strange, as though the actors had merely been performing improv and decided to change to a different scenario. This also means that a seemingly crucial plotline from the beginning is never resolved, with the death of two characters feeling more like padding for those early episodes than a substantial part of the story.
You might not be bored, then, but you may well be confused. Not only by the surfeit of plots and people, but by a series that starts off with a crop of riveting mysteries and poignant scenes then goes off on one too many tangents. Tall tales can be fun, sure, but these ones feel rather laboured.
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