#MeToo changed everything, certainly in terms of entertainment. Chivalry ostensibly has been designed to explore a landscape that was inch by inch evolving past ingrained sexism and exploitation but the hashtagged movement shoved over an enormous cliff.
It was a reckoning for the entertainment world a long time coming. Rocked in Britain at least by the even more ghoulish Operation Yewtree at the start of the decade, as long-standing national treasures were steadily outed as systemic child sex abusers following the horror of Jimmy Savile (which Chivalry co-star Steve Coogan will soon explore in The Reckoning, playing the monster himself), it was #MeToo that went global following the exposure of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein as a rapist and sex abuser of aspiring, and successful, actresses across decades. The floodgates opened.
Sarah Solemani, the co-star and writer opposite Coogan of Chivalry, has herself described instances where she too was objectified and potentially exploited by men in power (one anecdote recalls an unnamed fifty something director asking her youthful self to strip at a dinner to prove she was happy with on screen nudity), so she writes and portrays up and coming arthouse director Bobby from a position of understanding. She’s a woman in the entertainment industry – she’s been there. Which is why what Chivalry becomes across these six episodes is rather bizarre, given how it starts from a position of exciting, fresh and incisive comedy potential, and completely squanders it.
In short, Chivalry is two shows. The first is the one it promises to be. The second is the very cliche it has presumably been designed to deconstruct.
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