September 19, 2004, Sunday

Sally Kinnes

Hex, a British-made tale of school, sex and supernatural goings-on, stands out amid the slew of American shows on Sky One this autumn. Just don't mention Buffy, says SALLY KINNES

British television has traditionally had a simple approach to teen drama. It buys it in. There have been one or two exceptions -Grange Hill on the BBC, Hollyoaks on Channel 4, The Tribe on Five -but mostly, like bewildered parents who know they must do something to keep the teenagers happy, commissioning editors leave it to the Americans. A cheaper and less risky route than making original shows, it accounts for the pre- valence of imports such as Dawson's Creek, Beverly Hills 90210, The OC, Charmed, Angel and, towering over them all like the all-conquering, wisecracking, hair-tossing heroine she was, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Now Shine, Elisabeth Murdoch's independent production company, wants to beat the Americans at their own game. It has set out to make a teen drama that, in scope, production values and ambition, is indistinguishable from America's finest. Hex is a high-concept show.

Traditionally, that means a project that can be summed up in a sentence. So, Hex is a supernatural teen drama of fallen angels and unrequited love. Or, put another way, it is about a lovable lesbian who falls for her insecure roommate, who falls for a randy devil (and we do mean devil) disguised as a handsome rake. It is, though the creators will not thank us for saying so, the new Buffy.

"You have to raise the bar in TV," says Murdoch. "The oppor-tunity is certainly there, and I'm going to prove it by doing something that I don't think you have seen anywhere else."

Hex is set in a co-ed boarding school of indeterminate location. The English class system is nowhere to be seen, but it has American-style locker rooms and plenty of peer-group angst. The students are traditional enough to be taught John Donne, but it is not his metaphysics that interests them.Quoting a line from his poem The Good-morrow, one student asks "What does 'suck'd on country pleasures' mean?", lingering over the first syllable of "country" like a porn star. If her boyfriend has not shown her, says her teacher, "maybe he doesn't love you enough". It establishes a sharp, witty tone that becomes creepier as it goes along.

The school has a spooky past, and Cassie (Christina Cole) accidentally calls up its malevolent spirit, Azazeal (Michael Fassbender), a fallen angel of complicated provenance. The show's creators, Julian Murphy and Johnny Capps, found him in an apocryphal book of the Bible called Enoch. "When you do shows like this, I think the more rich you can make the mythology behind the characters, the more longevity they have," says Murphy.

As in most teenage shows, there is sex in abundance. To get the tone right, the producers thought back to their own teenage years. Capps, who is gay, remembers having a huge crush on his best friend. Murphy remembers "agonisingly painful love affairs". It is the unrequited crush that is the focus here. "For three or four years I was incredibly friendly with this guy who was flirting with me and I never knew how to read it. I spent my whole adolescence in confusion, thinking: 'Is he in love with me, or are we good friends?'"

Translated into Hex, it means that Thelma (a wonderful Jemima Rooper) carries a torch for her best friend, Cassie, but Cassie has other things on her mind. Her discovery of the house's past gives her supernatural powers, and it makes Hex, like Buffy, a tale of adolescent empowerment that mixes horror and humour. But Cassie is an ambivalent heroine. Not all her powers are used for good. High-concept shows also require their protagonists to have some inner turmoil, and Cassie does not always make the right decisions. "We're not concerned about simplistic notions of good," says Murphy. "We like a bit of irony in Britain, and we allow characters to be darker and messier than many American series do."

An even bigger difference is that, in Hex, the characters do not necessarily like each other. This is perhaps the biggest risk of all.

Virtually every American import that has worked is optimistic. The characters do not necessarily spend too much time emoting, but they are not about to stab each other in the back. Hex makes you a voyeur of its strange world, but does not necessarily make you want to be part of it.

Hex, however, has to work a little magic of its own. It is no secret that Shine needs a breakout hit. Murdoch has built a well-respected team, but she needs a knockout show. "This is a passion project. When Julian, Johnny and I got together, it was because we wanted to make this kind of show: high-concept, glossy, pacy, exciting television that could sit alongside American products and yet be unique to this market."

Hex will be shown on Sky One, which is ultimately presided over by Murdoch's brother James (chief executive of BSkyB -the satellite television station in which News International, owner of The Sunday Times, has a 35.4% stake), and where there is also room for improvement. Sky One's audience has been deserting it, disappearing like lemmings over a cliff, according to Dawn Airey, the managing director of Sky Networks.

To stop the exodus, it has re- appointed James Baker as con- troller of Sky One, and decided that continuing the brash, blokey image on which it was founded would have meant managing decline. Instead, Baker wants to "create a service people could perceive as a premium". That means being more upmarket, and being different. "It's a bigger challenge but, long-term, it's a better place for Sky One to be."

So it has cut down on sleazy sex and, instead, wants to a new relationship with older viewers. In ad-speak, that means ages 25-44, rather than 16-34 -or people who would rather Ibiza remained covered, and for whom The Villa is not a reality-TV show, but the place they go to in the south of France.

Sky One's quick-fix solution is to buy the best of America. We have been here before. It was thanks to buying ER and Friends, back in the 1990s, that Baker's Sky One was a channel to watch. Now he is doing it all over again. Baker's plan is that every month, Sky One will have a new show to shout about, and of the next six he has lined up, five are American: Deadwood, the brilliant western with Ian McShane, which starts on Tuesday; the Francis Ford Coppola-produced sci-fi series The 4400 (pronounced "forty four hundred"); a new Nip/Tuck; and a new 24. "I can't remember if I'm meant to tell you this, but we've also got a Denis Leary post-9/11-New York firehouse drama called Rescue Me."

Of these six, Hex is the only one that is home-grown, an unsustainable proportion if Sky One is to become a serious force in British television. "We've got a long way to go, but to reclaim our position of showing the best of the USA was stage one," says Baker. "Stage two is commissioning our own shows, and we'll really see the results of that in autumn 2005. We also want to have a point of view, so we're doing single, authored documentaries, which is something we have never done before. I haven't got a clue if people will want to watch yet, but I think it's a really good thing for us to do."

Sky, for so long the sports supertanker, is setting a new course. Whereas the previous chief exe-cutive, Tony Ball, was primarily interested in driving subscription, his successor, James Murdoch, has a different focus. "I've been at Sky eight years now," says Baker, "and it's the first time senior management has had a real belief that something other than sport can be part of customers' decisions to buy Sky or remain part of Sky."

In America, the cable channel HBO managed to turn itself from the home of sport and movies into the award-winning machine that has produced The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under and Deadwood. But Baker says the model is not HBO but the American magazine Vanity Fair. "It's accessible, it's readable, it's not scary and it's aspirational. People want to be part of that, and, to me, that's the analogy."

Vanity Fair seems a bit old for Hex viewers, but Baker is hoping it will attract three audiences: teens, women and older men who like fantasy programming and pretty young things. If it can do all that in sufficient numbers, it might be enough to start spooking its rivals.

Hex starts on Sky One on October 17