Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Stonehouse’ On BritBox, Where ‘Succession’ Star Matthew Macfadyen Plays A Real-Life British Parliament Member Who Fakes His Own Death

In November 1974, former British cabinet minister John Stonehouse pretended to drown in the ocean off Miami, and escaped to Australia hoping to start over under a new identity. It only took a few months for him to get caught. A “based on true events” accounting of Stonehouse’s career, his disappearance and arrest are documented in a new BritBox limited series.

STONEHOUSE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In a light-blue suit, a man walks through a hotel lobby holding a towel. He then passes the pool and goes to the beach.

The Gist: It’s November, 1974. John Stonehouse (Matthew Macfadyen), a member of the British House of Commons and a former cabinet member in the Labour party government, looks around, takes off his clothes and carefully folds them on the towel, then slowly walks into the surf. We then switch to a session of the House of Commons where a minute of silence is given in honor of Stonehouse’s death.

We then flash back “Several Years Earlier,” presumably the late ’60s. Stonehouse is an up-and-coming MP, to the point where Prime Minister Harold Wilson (Kevin McNally) puts him charge of the Ministry of Aviation. Stonehouse celebrates the appointment at dinner with his wife Barbara (Keeley Hawes) and three kids, assuring him that, while he’ll be away more, he’s doing important work.

On a trip to Czechoslovakia, he is seduced by the sexy translator into having an extramarital affair, which he finds out the next day was a way for Czech intelligence to blackmail him and turn him into an asset. When his handler, Alexander Marek (Igor Grabuzov), tells him the situation, all Stonehouse wants to know is if he’ll get paid to give the Czechs information.

Over the next few years, as his profile rises in Wilson’s cabinet — he gets a promotion to Postmaster General, and he ends up speaking for the Labour party on the BBC before a crucial election — he continues to give Marek information and gets paid for it. He upgrades to a suburban mansion, sends the kids to private schools, and sets up numerous shell companies with different bank accounts in order to launder the money. He even gets a code name: “Twister.”

The one big problem: His information is useless. Most of the time, it’s quite boring. And Marek is tiring of Stonehouse’s act. So he tells Stonehouse that he’ll either cut off the money, out the dalliance with the translator to the media, or both. This coincides with Labour’s loss in the election, which returns Stonehouse to his status as a back-bencher MP.

The only thing that he seems to get any enjoyment out of is the affair he’s having with his secretary, Sheila Buckley (Emer Heatley), who has a bit of a speech impediment, but seems to anticipate Stonehouse’s needs better than anyone, including his wife.

As we get deeper into the ’70s, Stonehouse’s money woes start to pile up, he is not given a cabinet job when Wilson is reinstalled as PM, and he’s also informed by his friend at the Times that they’re going to publish an investigation into some inconsistencies they’ve found with his various businesses. This leads Stonehouse to put his plan to disappear in motion, starting with a trip to Miami he claims is for work.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Stonehouse feels like a cross between A Very English Scandal and The Thief, His Wife And The Canoe.

Our Take: Written by John Preston and directed by Jon S. Baird, Stonehouse has a tone that’s more like a caper and less like the story of a former cabinet minister and MP who tried in disgrace to fake his own death. We understand the temptation to do this, because in every way possible, Stonehouse was pretty inept; he was equally bumbling as a cabinet minister, as a husband, as a spy and as a fugitive.

And if anyone can play that ineptness and not make it look cartoonish, it’s Macfadyen. He won an Emmy for playing that kind of ineptitude in Succession, and he brings a lot of the same qualities to the role of John Stonehouse. Arrogance, a bit of overconfidence, and then the strong feeling that he’s in over his head. Macfadyen pulls off Stonehouse’s particular kind of starched flop-sweaty manner in a way that seems effortless.

There isn’t a whole lot of character that surrounds him, at least not in the first of the three episodes. Hawes seems wasted as Stonehouse’s loyal but suspicious wife Barbara. We see her looking into the briefcases her husband kept putting away in an upper bedroom cupboard but she’s flummoxed when she opens them and sees nothing; the money that was in them has already been laundered. Aside from a speech impediment, the only thing we know about Heatley is that she’s really, really dedicated to her boss. Wilson and other British government officials are just stuffy archetypes at this point.

As Stonehouse escapes to Australia, calls for Heatley to join him, then gets caught, we hope a few more characters come to the fore. Then again, just watching Macfadyen try to be stealthy for three episodes may just be entertaining enough all by itself.

Sex and Skin: When the Czech translator has sex with Stonehouse, there is more skin than we expected from a BritBox show.

Parting Shot: Stonehouse, handing over a faked passport with the name of a dead constituent, books a new flight from Miami.

Sleeper Star: As we said, Hawes is underutilized here as Barbara Stonehouse. But we’re happy to see her nevertheless.

Most Pilot-y Line: When he takes meetings with people who own companies where he wants to invest, one pair seems to be particularly astute, with one partner telling the other, “I don’t think he’s a wise man.” That’s quite on the nose.

Our Call: STREAM IT, mainly because Matthew Macfadyen is quite good as the somewhat vapid, wholly incompetent John Stonehouse. The rest of Stonehouse feels like it’s a bit light and trivial, but it wisely puts Macfadyen front and center in just about every scene.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.