Hustle is back A new season of Hustle means it’s Kelly Adams pic-spam time. Or, more to the point, it’s a chance to farewell this show.
In some respects, it has run its course. This episode, like the one before it (where Robert Vaughn gets to star with his former screen wife from The Protectors, Hannah Gordon) spent too much time on a secondary storyline (the Ian Rush photograph). A few others in the seventh season similarly felt stunted, even if they helped secure the highest-ever ratings for the series.
Since it’s filmed in Brum, pretending to be London, the locations can’t give the game away so too much effort is spent hiding the outside, including claustrophobic sets—unlike the many glassy towers that the first five seasons were filmed in.
The budget cuts have been, in my opinion, too much for Hustle. Without the glamour, the TimeSlice sequences, and sufficiently tricky cons that take up the entire hour, it lacks the polish that made it special. I realize the other choice might have been an earlier farewell to the show. But the notion that Kudos puts all its money on the screen has not been true for some time—Ashes to Ashes suffered from similar budget cuts as it neared its end, culminating in a disappointing, largely studio-based third season. As with Ashes, BBC1 has put Hustle on a Friday night, where TV shows go to die.
Sloppiness abounds: why, pray tell, was Bharat Nalluri’s credit missing again last week? This sort of carelessness also crept in to the seventh season, with creator Tony Jordan’s name missing from some episodes, too.
I think all the Hustle actors are great, especially Adrian Lester, whose presence was missed for season four; and all the Midlands episodes, so far, still rank ahead of that disappointing fourth season, even if they gave Marc Warren a larger role. Still, Tony Jordan is right to call time, and I will be interested to see what sort of a send-off he gives the crew in five weeks’ time.
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