Two Weeks to Live (one of Paramount+’s first original shows) follows GoT‘s Maisie Williams as she revenges her way around England. There’s familiar millennial awkwardness in this mostly well-made series, writes Eliza Janssen.
After her breakout role as Arya in Game of Thrones, Maisie Williams may have found herself typecast as a teen avenger. Not the kind of big capital ‘A’ Marvel’s Avenger that’d get Paramount+ sued: just a regular kind of person employing violent retribution to get over the murder of their dad. Going off this highly digestible British action-comedy series, we’d be fine to see that kill list roll on a bit longer.
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In Two Weeks To Live, Williams plays a far less steely kind of assassin than the supernaturally capable Arya, clumsily revenge-ing her way around Northern England’s pubs and chip shops. Raised by a paranoid survivalist mother to believe that the end is nigh, her protagonist Kim is desperate to experience everything adolescence has to offer before some unspecified nuclear holocaust. She’s even got a blood-spattered diary of all the stuff she’s got to get done; from a first date (with likeable dweeb Nicky) to walking in high heels (calamitously).
Creator Gaby Hull has pulled off a solid balancing act with her main character: Kim isn’t dumb, but her naivety and wonder at the (to our eyes) unimpressive world around her is consistently fun to watch across all eight episodes. In a drab shopping centre aisle she’s adorably boggled at the sheer amount of “stuff” there is: “This is the milk…of a nut. How do you milk a nut?”
That harmless ignorance turns out to be not so harmless, however, when Nicky (Mawaan Rizwan) and his knucklehead brother Jay (Taheen Modak) play a light-hearted prank on Kim, rigging up a cheap fake news clip to scare her into thinking it’s an apocalypse, now. Like, right now. She springs into action, finding and slaying the man she’s been told killed her father while avoiding recapture by her attack-helicopter-parent mum Tina (Sian Clifford). Clifford is as hilariously uptight here as in her supporting role in Fleabag, scolding her daughter, “How many times have I said to you ‘gloves and a gun if you wanna have fun’? It bloody rhymes, for fuck’s sake.”
Once Kim and her mum are reluctantly reunited, poor Nicky and Jay must hit the road too, putting claustrophobic pressure on both a fractured mother-daughter dynamic and a sweet blossoming romance. The former relationship definitely raises more fascinating dramatic questions than the latter, as we’re left to wonder why Tina chose such a (literally) nuclear option in protecting her kid; lying about the dangers of the outside world and giving Kim breath mints as “pollution medicine” to feed her belief. Although both Williams and Modak give winning performances as the gawky young heroes, barely dating before being plunged into a Jeep-chasing, landmine-blowing conspiracy, their love story feels predictable when compared to Kim and her mother’s codependent connection.
Two Weeks To Live stands out as one of the first original shows on the braggadocious new streaming platform Paramount+. Its neighbours on the homepage are mostly properties rebooted from a decade ago (Dexter, Spongebob, the horny adult return of iCarly) and some well-reviewed returning dramas poached from network TV (Five Bedrooms, Why Women Kill). And while I initially got a cursed vibe that Two Weeks To Live might have been bumped around from other channels and streaming services (the Quibi jeebies, shall we call it??), I’m happy to find the show is mostly cinematic, thoughtful, and well-made.
Contrary to the Paramount+ promise of “unique stories and iconic stars”, it feels more like a familiar, watchable gem from Stan or Netflix (where the edgier The End Of The F***ing World covered very similar teen doomer territory). The humour, too, has a well-trodden millennial awkwardness that can get old as you realise every character is indeed going to talk like this. For example, the second episode’s showdown between Kim and Sean Pertwee’s gun-wielding baddie has them trading gritty action-movie threats before pausing to geek out at themselves: “That was a really nice exchange there!” “It felt good, didn’t it?”
We feel the stakes of the story’s quick pacing and action sequences gradually slip, every one of these tense moments punctuated by a comic anticlimax. Before too long, any actual climax feels secondary to the character’s so-very-British uncomfortable banter, making the narrative twists and turns of the last few episodes less impactful than they could’ve been.
And that’s okay—with too much more grit and bigger set pieces, Two Weeks To Live would feel like a chopped-up, misplaced feature-length story squeezed into a small package. As is, it’s a digestible British thriller that doesn’t take itself at all seriously. If Kim’s journey to independence could’ve admittedly used more emotional wallop, it’s not the end of the world: things are nicely left open for a second season.
