We only get five minutes into ITV’s newest drama, Out There, before the scenes of bucolic Welsh countryside are shattered. A farmer strolls through fields with a shotgun crooked over his arm (already ominous) and a sheepdog at his heels.
And as he walks, he sees a drone buzzing overhead. The farmer promptly shoots it down, and so begins a protracted war that will slowly destroy his life, and that of his young son. Cheery!
Our farmer is Nathan Williams, who’s played by Martin Clunes with aggressive false cheer and a thick, homely Welsh burr. He’s been trying to make a living from the land for decades, but things are hard. He and his son Johnny (Louis Ashbourne Serkis) knock around a giant empty farmhouse, left emptier by the death of his wife two years previously. Scenes of them eating dinner are done in silence.
It's quiet, desolate stuff, and Clunes sells it utterly, affecting a type of ‘we’ll get through this’ stoicism, which slowly crumbles to reveal something a lot more ruthless. And then the drug dealers move in. The name ‘Out There’ suggests an alien invasion of some sort, or a Hot Fuzz-style farmer-vs-world scenario. The series’ imagery backs this up, showing Clunes staring into the dark and wielding a shotgun like an American cowboy.
The reality is less dramatic but arguably scarier. Here, the aliens are drug dealers from the cities, who are slowly moving into the countryside, and causing havoc among the locals.
It starts slowly; insidiously. Johnny is given a package to look after by a friend, Rhys (Gerran Howells). The mysterious drone keeps showing up. Somebody who claims to be a businessman attempts to move into Nathan’s holiday home, which they no longer rent out. Jeeps are seen driving around off-road in the undergrowth.
As Nathan gets slowly more consumed by the task of figuring out who’s behind it, Johnny (played with a kind of sad resignation by Serkis) gets sucked into the darker side of county lines: the dealing, for aggressive gangsters who are very happy to use violence to get what they want. And soon, he’s very, very out of his depth.
Make no mistake, this is a bleak show – almost as bleak as the frankly criminal saturated filter they’ve put on everything, which renders the gorgeous Welsh countryside in shades of grey, and, er, more grey.
Farming is hard work, underpaid and ruinous for the mental health; panning shots of Nathan driving through the Brecon Beacons serve to demonstrate just how isolated and quiet his community. “This life's a struggle, isn't it. Every day. We must be mad,” he says at one point.
You certainly have to be born to it to stay in it. Not only is farming unprofitable (“you’ve remortgaged 3 times in 10 years to keep the farm afloat”, his financial advisor tells him), but corporations are buying up land like there’s no tomorrow. In one particularly harrowing scene in the first episode, Nathan’s neighbour commits suicide.
County lines is just the latest issue – the cherry on the cake of bad news. Is it any wonder, then, that this extremely repressed farmer decides to distract himself from his impending bankruptcy by going to war with the people who are making his community a living hell?
As the action unfolds, it does so slowly, layers of the story unpeeling like the petals of an onion. There’s a meditative, hypnotic element to the storytelling, which makes the moments of violence all the more shocking. Just like Nathan and Johnny, we’re in over our heads before we realise it. Gripping stuff – but a joke or two wouldn’t hurt.
Out There is streaming now on ITV
