A cut above TV’s usual #MeToo fare: BBC1’s Rules of the Game reviewed

As you may have noticed, it’s something of a golden age for TV shows about how invisible middle-aged women are — except perhaps, in all those TV shows about how invisible middle-aged women are.

At first sight, Rules of the Game — a crime drama set in a northern sportswear company — seemed a fairly standard example. The company in question, Fly Dynamic, has a management style that some might consider a little sleazy, run as it is by a group of men who’ve never met a 16-year-old girl they didn’t want to ply with booze and drugs. Meanwhile their neglected wives amuse themselves as best they can with cheese evenings.

Luckily, these early signs that we were in for just another well-meaning but dramatically crude homily about toxic you-know-what proved deceptive. Granted, after two episodes, the blokes remain uniformly villainous. But in a rare and welcome twist, the female characters are pretty flawed too: to such an extent that if Thomas Middleton hadn’t already bagged it in the 17th century, the title Women Beware Women wouldn’t be a bad fit.

The programme began, like many a crime drama before it, with the sight of police tape and white-clad forensic investigators. The location was Fly Dynamic’s reception area where a body had been found by COO Sam Thompson (Maxine Peake), who was then driven away to provide the police with a series of flashbacks — including, impressively, to events she hadn’t been present at. So far we still don’t know whose body Sam found, although we’ve been firmly (maybe too firmly?) led to believe that it was that of Tess Jones, a twenty-something Fly employee much given to drinking heavily and talking about suicide.