Playing Nice is bland, generic porridge that buries potential for a good human thriller
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James Norton – who seems trapped on ITV when, by rights, he should be a movie star – provides a lacklustre performance. Kids can be a handful, right? From The Omen to The Midwich Cuckoos, film and television loves to show the disconnect between parents and progeny. But what if that dynamic was shaped, not by some demonic force, but by an apparent administrative error? That’s the question posed by ITV’s new four-part drama, Playing Nice, which follows two families navigating the total upending of their domestic lives.
![[James Norton as Pete in the new four-part drama]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/03/13/newFile-1.jpg)
Pete (James Norton) and Maddie (Niamh Algar) live a seemingly idyllic life in Cornwall with their young son Theo. Idyllic, that is, until they get word from the hospital: Theo might not be their biological son. It seems that there was a switch-up during his difficult birth, meaning that they swapped babies with another couple, Miles (James McArdle) and Lucy (Jessica Brown Findlay).
“With your cooperation we will get to the bottom of this,” a hospital goon tells the couple. And they do cooperate – they play nice, so to speak – engaging with the other family, and agreeing to an arrangement where all four parents are involved in both children’s lives. But these are uncharted waters, and things rapidly begin to disintegrate.
What begins as an elevator pitch to traumatise new parents becomes an examination of wealth and the legal system. Miles is some entrepreneurial bigwig, living in a vast modernist mansion overlooking the sea (which allows for barbs like “you know what they say about people in glass houses”), with the resources to fight both the hospital, first, and then the other couple. Can he simply bulldoze his way into sole custody of both the boys? Will he destroy Pete and Maddie’s relationship in the process? Or is this charismatic bloke with the big house hiding a darker purpose?.
