Honey Review: Flirty, Kinky Killing Eve Prequel Hits BBC One
Honey, a flirty, kinky Killing Eve prequel starring Ann Skelly as a young Carolyn Martens, airs on BBC One on Saturday, November 14 at 9pm. Set in 1982 East Berlin, it follows a honeypot spy told to seduce men and photograph them.
Honey, a flirty, kinky Killing Eve prequel, starts on BBC One at 9pm on Saturday, November 14, with Ann Skelly as the young spy-handler Carolyn Martens. The series is an origin story for the character Fiona Shaw played in Killing Eve.
Cold war, camp tone
The story opens in East Berlin in 1982, where the East German government runs an army of citizen informants. A title page flags the period setting while establishing a very un-period tone. Its tagline reads: "Everyone is watching … look hot!"
A young Martens is smuggled into the eastern sector in the back of a Trabant driven by her handler, Anderson. Renamed Martha Schmitt, she gets her instructions. Rory Kinnear plays Anderson.
Her job is to act as a honeypot. She must seduce well-placed men and take compromising photographs, which are meant to pressure them into passing sensitive information to the west.
The show pairs her with an American agent, Kurt Fischer, played by Nate Mann. Neither is pleased. Her fight to be taken seriously as a spy, without falling into what one viewer's review called "boring love", drives the plot.
Tone and style
Emma Moran created the series. It leans on gags, pop songs and knowingly anachronistic dialogue. One sausage-factory worker, speaking of a murdered colleague Martha is investigating, says: "That guy was a dick. He never came to any ice-cream socials."
The look is polished, with credits styled like a redacted Stasi dossier. Martha strides around in a bright miniskirt and thigh-highs. Supporting characters trade meta-textual jokes, and accents vary widely.
Martha and Kurt wear ludicrous disguises, like characters from Cluedo. Martha also meets Anderson in a private room and plays shagging noises from a cassette player to cover their debriefs. The reviewer notes the physics of the ruse does not stack up, but says it yields good running gags.
Spy purists may find it thin. The reviewer calls the show arguably a music-video version of a traumatised country, built more on sensibility than sense.
The Killing Eve universe
The eastern bloc works as a model box for the show's usual interests: dressing up, banter, pop-feminism, queerness and light kink. Most of the kink comes from Friedrich Baumann, a repressed Oberstleutnant, or lieutenant colonel, who hunts spies.
Jannis Niewöhner plays Baumann, and the reviewer calls the character the most interesting part of the show. Niewöhner is German, so his native accent highlights the fruity efforts of other cast members. The reviewer says several of those accents sound as if they belong in a reboot of 'Allo 'Allo.
Skelly's Martha is described as bushy-tailed, and Kinnear's Anderson as brilliantly stuffy. Honey airs on BBC One at 9pm on November 14.
