BBC’s four-part crime drama, set in toxic workplace, has some merits but runs out of steam and rehashes tiresome tropes, writes Lillian Crawford.
Rules of The Game: Season 1
The MeToo movement has been a gold rush for screenwriters, ranging from Oscar-bait Bombshell to indie film The Assistant, with hugely variable degrees of quality. Ruth Fowler’s four-part BBC series Rules of the Game uses this on-trend springboard to craft a crime drama set within the toxic workplace culture of a sportswear brand. While period series such as Mad Men have depicted the oppression of women not uncritically, it’s good to see contemporary misogyny tackled head on.
Rules of the Game begins with COO Sam Thompson, played with characteristic po-facedness by Maxine Peake, heading to work on a “Pajama Friday” only to discover an unseen dead body in the reception area. At this point the narrative splits, following Sam as she is interviewed about “The Deceased” by the police, and the events in the workplace in the weeks preceding the incident. This bipartite structure works effectively, opening up the possibility of myopic unreliability of the narration we are being fed.
What the complexity of flashbacks and flashforwards in the series allows is a multi-dimensional breakdown of the central death in its immediate and long-term causes. It seems at first that Sam is perpetuating the “boys’ club” dynamic of the company she works for, which she undoubtedly is, but through examining her career progression it’s clear that she too was affected by her male superiors when she started working at the age of 16.
The view that Sam seems to take is that what was once acceptable, even only 10 years prior, is not OK any longer. The boozy nights out, sexual passivity to men in the office and doing drugs with the lads, without any consideration for the psychological toll this behaviour was having. What Rules of the Game perhaps fails to attack is that this behaviour was never appropriate in the workplace, and that the hardiness Sam takes pride in shouldn’t have been forced upon her.
The series does seem to be aware of this, and Sam does acknowledge eventually the damage done to herself and her colleagues, even to the extent of death. Where Rules of the Game fails is in its conclusion, which points the finger of blame towards women who would rather cover up misconduct than pull it out at the roots. The victorious endnote is more bitter than the showmakers seem to realise.
Peake does her usual schtick here—a hardy, no-nonsense performance with little room for affection or relatability. While she’s the series’ A-lister, it’s Rakhee Thakrar as new HR manager Maya Benshaw who really shines. Maya shows genuine concern for her female colleagues, and pushes back against Sam’s enabling behaviour to overturn the negative standards that have become commonplace.
While it’s good to see neurodivergent characters on screen, the trope of the obsessive autistic person driving themselves crazy through fanatical research is extremely tiresome. There are certainly moments which are positive—for example Maya’s need to have her fridge organised in a specific way. But the notion that autistic-coded people are sociopathic amateur detectives has worn thin, and in a “problem” drama such as this, it seems to create problems in the stead of those it seeks to attack.
Even at four episodes, Rules of the Game runs out of steam and often doesn’t know how to regain momentum. Playing something so real and insidious as workplace misconduct and sexual assault as a twisting thriller risks feeling egregious, and the drama regularly falls into this trapping. The notion that people have to suffer, especially at the hands of men, in order to recover and gain their strengths is extremely harmful, and one which this series perpetuates. The rules of the game are shown to need breaking, but we should be challenging their very conception.
