"You can see what attracted Lincoln to the part. John is the anti-Grimes. We meet him (once the obligatory opening scene of the character covered in blood and running through some woods is over and we've flashed back to Two months earlier) fleeing the sight of a man in the playground beating up a woman, so panic-stricken that he leaves one of his two children there and has to go back for her."
"The family then moves to Scotland for a fresh start, although his high-flyer wife, Fiona (Indira Varma), seems far too intelligent for us to believe that she would countenance this as the answer to his post-playground PTSD and/or be married to a berk. For a berk John is. A supposedly willing househusband, he is bad with the kids and fails to keep on top of domestic matters, dumping them all back on Fiona the minute she walks in the door after work."
"He also can't manage sex with her, though he's OK when left to his own devices in the shower. I don't know who to write to in order to beg for a different way of announcing that a show is going to deal with the crisis in modern masculinity, but there has to be someone. Or at least a helpline I can call."
Andrew Lincoln spent 15 years playing Rick Grimes and now appears on stage in The Lady from the Sea and in the thriller Coldwater. In Coldwater he plays John, an anti-Grimes figure introduced in a bloodied opening before flashing back two months earlier to a panic in a playground where he momentarily abandons a child. The family relocates to Scotland for a fresh start, but Fiona, a high-flying wife, seems unlikely to accept such a move as therapy. John functions as a failing househusband: poor with children, neglectful of domestic duties and sexually distant, though privately masturbatory in the shower. Petty marital grievances are interwoven with practical realities to keep the storyline engaging despite familiar themes about modern masculinity.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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