The Iris Affair opens with a bang: a man is beaten half to death while a woman, Iris Nixon (Niamh Algar), refuses to hand over a MacGuffin to Cameron Beck (Tom Hollander, channelling Michael Caine). A teenager, Joy (Meréana Tomlinson), looks on in horror as Beck hesitates to shoot her himself but orders his henchman to do so. Just as the gun swings around, the action cuts to Sardinia, Italy, the day before. It is a prologue that is properly tense and disorientating, setting the stage for a wild ride.
The eight-part series, created by Neil Cross (Luther), keeps the pedal to the metal with perfect control over timelines, locations, and twists. Algar plays Iris, a supergenius puzzle solver who is recruited by eccentric entrepreneur Cameron Beck to crack the code for his evil supercomputer, Charlie Big Potatoes. The machine, hidden in a secret lair in Slovenia, uses 2m qubits and non-organic polymers to think thoughts that have yet to be thought. “It’s not small potatoes, is it?” Beck quips.
Iris must break the code hidden in the diary of the computer’s inventor, Jensen Lind (Kristofer Hivju), who has gone mad and now sits mute in a wheelchair. Two years later, Beck is funding an international hunt for Iris via the Two Seconds to Midnight website run by Alfie Bird (Sacha Dhawan). The cat-and-mouse game that follows recalls the early thrills of Killing Eve, before that series lost its way.
The Iris Affair is a rollicking yarn, stylishly directed by Terry McDonough and Sarah O’Gorman. Cross’s script is drily witty and avoids cynicism, while Algar excels as a woman who has had enough of everyone’s nonsense. It takes real guts to write TV this thrillingly preposterous, and the result is a joy to watch.
