Hunting Alice Bell, a six-part Channel 4 drama starring Simon Pegg, is a punchy but chaotic thriller that tackles conspiracy theories, witch hunts and incel culture, ultimately unraveling like a real-life version of The Traitors. Created by David Baddiel and Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw, the series is partly inspired by the story of Ian Huntley's former girlfriend Maxine Carr.
A Familiar Opening with a Twist
The drama opens with a woman found guilty of aiding and abetting Jason Nash (Simon Pegg), a murderous anaesthetist and her former boyfriend. A furious crowd bangs on the van as it takes her away to serve 18 months in prison. But the woman under the blanket is a decoy – the real Alice Bell is smuggled out of another exit. The mob's bloodlust is deferred but not satisfied, and upon her release, Bell is given a new identity.
Several years later, Fran Da Silva (Alexandra Roach) is sitting down to breakfast with her husband and two teenage stepchildren when a brick crashes through the window. She is ostracised at work, and the kids come home from school with bloody noses and tales of abuse. At the insistence of social services, the family's infant daughter is sent to live with her grandmother.
Online Campaign and Dodgy Cop
The online campaign against Da Silva is the handiwork of an orchestrator styling himself as True Crime Buster, who has decided that Fran is Alice Bell. He is a transparent grifter, superpowered by attention. He argues for the public's right to know certain facts while simultaneously proving precisely why they can't be trusted with them. He talks about “feminazis”.
There is also a dodgy cop involved: Ralf Little's Graham Hunter. The police's role in the narrative is ambiguous and jarring. The family don't call them until their home is surrounded by masked vigilantes wielding clubs. But another problem emerges: if the philosophical heart of the show lies in exploring how groundless conspiracy theories take hold, why introduce the possibility of another, arguably even more far-fetched one? This plotline feels like a category error, something that belongs in a different drama with less serious intentions.
A Hot Mess with a Strong Landing
Hunting Alice Bell often feels like a mess, but it has the good grace to be a hot one. Fran finds that she's not the only woman who might be (but almost certainly isn't) Alice Bell. Soon, there's a small support group for women accused of being her. They begin their first meeting by intoning solemnly, one by one, “I am not Alice Bell”. They become a cause celebre, invited to conferences and making media appearances. But is everyone in the group telling the truth? Speculation mounts, and the hunt for Alice Bell risks turning into a high-stakes, real-life version of The Traitors.
At various stages, the momentum risks dying in a hail of bullet-points. There are nods to the manosphere, to “incel” culture, to our compulsive urge to document our lives. Everything is a little too on the nose. It shares DNA traces with another Channel 4 drama, Tip Toe, exploring contemporary moral messages without a great deal of subtlety. The writing, though, lacks Russell T Davies's surefooted way with dialogue and characterisation. It also doesn't quite know what it is: a study in modern manners, a whodunnit, or a social satire. Hunting Alice Bell tries to be all of those things at once.
It's at its strongest once it settles down and allows itself to be what it truly is: a twisty thriller. Can the Not Alice Bells hold themselves together, clear their names, and, as ironically suggested by Fran, stay friends for life? None of these women are flawless or even particularly functional, so you doubt their chances. But the show does stick the landing, and it does so cleverly, by using viewers' likely confirmation bias against them. Do we find Alice Bell? That's besides the point. We find a lynch mob culture in which, like it or not, plenty of us are only a few clicks away from banging on the side of a police van ourselves. Hunting Alice Bell is on Channel 4 now.
