Reviewer Pans Channel 5's Forever Home Adaptation — SkimNews
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- Forever Home is a six-part Channel 5 thriller adapted from Graham Norton's bestselling novel, in which Carol (Amy Nuttall) discovers the corpse of her partner Robert's first wife defrosting in a faulty cellar freezer.
- The cast includes Denise Welch as Carol's theatrical mother Moira, Douglas Henshall as the dementia-stricken Robert, Lewis Cope as Robert's son Kaden, Jenny Walser as the gullible Sally, and James Baxter as the adulterous Patrick.
- The reviewer groups the show with other Channel 5 entries — Number One Fan, For Her Sins, The Fortune and The Game — branding them all 'mechanically separated tubes of bunkum' from the network's 'Indistinguishable Domestic Thriller Processing Complex.'
- Attempts at humor, including the line 'She doesn't know her Van Goghs from her Van Dammes!' and a 'winking string motif,' fall flat when paired with grim subject matter like dismemberment and stalking, the reviewer argues.
- The only subject the show treats with seriousness is Robert's dementia, signalled by a 'sad piano' rather than the comic scoring that accompanies the rest of the drama.
- The review concludes bluntly: 'don't go into the cellar.'
Why it matters: The verdict matters for Channel 5, whose domestic-thriller template — already applied to Number One Fan, For Her Sins, The Fortune and The Game — is here dismissed as 'mechanically separated tubes of bunkum,' suggesting audience tolerance for the format may be wearing thin even on the network's low-expectations weeknight slot.
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