Best Interests review: ‘heart-shattering’ drama on BBC One

“It was with a huge sense of trepidation” that I tuned into BBC One’s new four-part drama “Best Interests”, said Nick Hilton in The Independent. Written by Jack Thorne, it tells the harrowing story of a couple who must decide whether doctors should keep treating their desperately unwell daughter.

Nicci (Sharon Horgan) and Andrew (Michael Sheen) have dedicated the past decade to caring for 13-year-old Marnie, who has muscular dystrophy. When a chest infection sends her to the ICU, the hospital suggests withdrawing care, and the once tight-knit family begins to splinter. This is the stuff of nightmares, but the acting is superb, and the writing manages to remain “witty and lively” even as the gut-wrenching power of the story encroaches.

“Best Interests” is a bit overlong, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer; given the amount of repetition, “at least one episode could have been chopped”. Still, “Thorne gets his essential messaging through (disabled lives have worth; disabled people are people), and, by God, he knows how to make the breaking human heart speak”.

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There are clichés here and there, said Carol Midgley in The Times: within the first ten minutes, for instance, Andrew and Nicci have sex on a cluttered kitchen worktop, despite there being “non-crumby surfaces nearby” (this, of course, “never happens”). But overall, this is a “wonderful, heart-shattering piece of work” that succeeds in making Marnie not a legal case, but a joyous, rounded person. “I defy anyone not to cry.”

Where to watch: BBC iPlayer