Erin Doherty was one of the breakout stars of The Crown, unexpectedly making Princess Anne the coolest member of the Windsor clan. Now she has her first television starring role in Chloe (BBC One), a moreish psychological thriller about a young woman who inveigles her way into a group of close-knit friends by adopting a fake identity.
A conwoman, then, but Doherty and writer-director Alice Seabright work hard to make the character multi-layered. Her real name is Becky Green, but she is not a sharp-elbowed Becky Sharp. Instead, she is a loner desperate for connection, trying to escape her pitiable home life caring for a mother with early-onset dementia. There’s a sociopathic edge to her behaviour, as she steals and lies with consummate ease, but a deep insecurity and self-loathing to go with it.
It’s an old story, updated for the Instagram age. Becky is obsessed with scrolling through the feed of a glamorous contemporary, Chloe Fairbourne. When she discovers that Chloe has died – via a social media post quoting The Smiths – she adopts a new persona, as a swish marketing executive called Sasha, and swiftly infiltrates Chloe’s friendship group (easy enough to do when every detail of their lives can be gleaned through some basic online snooping). This smug middle-class bunch include Pippa Bennett-Warner as Chloe’s best friend and Jack Farthing as a tortured artist type. Billy Howle is Chloe’s widowed husband and, in a somewhat unlikely bit of characterisation, a local councillor.
You know how it’s going to go: Becky’s lies will find it increasingly hard to keep the plates spinning, the fear of exposure will drive her to ever more extreme acts. We learn, as the episodes unfold, that Becky has not picked Chloe at random for her cyber-stalking. And Seabright has fun by bringing in Josh (Brandon Micheal Hall), a character who rumbles Becky early on and is amused, rather than appalled, by her deception.
Doherty’s face occupies nearly every frame. We see her glumly eating her breakfast in her flat on the outskirts of Bristol, then energised by the thrill of the con. But Becky suffers, very literally from imposter syndrome: imagining that everyone can see straight through her to the dull, worthless wretch she considers herself to be.
It all hangs together well, with the mysterious circumstances of Chloe’s death acting as an additional plot device. Ultimately, it’s a commentary on social media, because isn’t Becky’s behaviour just an extreme version of the fakery deployed by every Instagram user curating glossy pictures of their oh-so-successful life?
