Forever Home

“When Carol finally shares her cadaver-based discovery with Moira, it’s party time at the giggle factory. You can’t tell the police, shrieks Moira. There’ll be trophy hunters. “This place will become like a grisly house of horrors! Robert … AKA Fred West!” Does this lighthearted approach to unhilarious subjects (eg dismemberment and stalking) work? It does not. Does it at least offer the odd moment of blackly comic respite from what would otherwise be an unremittingly bleak catalogue of domestic traumas? Again, no. Instead, we have a drama that crashes between tones and issues like a drunken soap, but without the earnestness or depth of characterisation that can make these things bearable. The only topic Forever Home considers a lol-free zone is Robert’s dementia. We know this because his scenes are accompanied by a sad piano rather than thigh-slapping and titters. Nobody turns up to a weeknight Channel 5 thriller expecting prestige subtlety or searing psychological insight. But is it too much to ask for a script that doesn’t honk like a defrosting corpse? Suffice to say: don’t go into the cellar.”
Sarah Dempster, The Guardian