What to Watch Now: Hijack

Peter Fincham recommends an absurdly addictive hostage drama starring Idris Elba

Have you seen Hijack (Apple TV+)? It’s one of those series that everybody has an opinion about, ranging from “It’s great, I love it,” to “It’s completely ridiculous.” Often these views come from the same person.

The premise is simple. A London-bound British plane takes off from Dubai and is promptly hijacked. The flight takes seven hours, and so does the series. Anyone who’s been on a long flight knows that even when you’ve read your book, watched a movie, enjoyed your in-flight meal and listened to a couple of podcasts, there’s still a point when you get bored and have a nap. There’s no danger of that happening during Hijack.

The central character is one of the passengers, Sam Nelson, who is sitting in business class. We never really get to know who Sam is but he’s clearly very good at crisis management. This is because he’s played by Idris Elba, and when you’re being held hostage at 36,000 feet by gun-toting madmen and Idris tells you what to do, you do it.

Sam’s got an ex-girlfriend back in London and she’s now going out with a character played by Max Beesley, who is some sort of policeman in the special squad. He also likes shouting instructions at people.

As things escalate, politicians get involved, in particular the Foreign Secretary (Hattie Morahan) and the Home Secretary (Neil Stuke), both of whom do a bit of shouting, not least at each other. All in all, this is a drama that involves a lot of people shouting and looking tense.

The hijackers are a mixed bunch, with no obvious motives – it’s made clear early on that they’re not terrorists – and as befits the age we live in, they cover different races and genders.

One of them is a young woman with a Geordie accent played by Aimée Kelly, who was nominated as Best British Newcomer at the London Film Festival a while ago for her role in the movie Sket. (No, me neither.)

Here she plays the token female hijacker and spends most of her time walking up and down the aisles like a demented schoolteacher invigilating an exam. Her lines are mainly variations on “SIT DOWN!”, “SIT FUCKING DOWN!” and “I’ve already told you, FUCKING SIT DOWN!”.

I’m not sure any award nominations beckon for this role.

But bringing film festival criteria to bear when judging Hijack isn’t really the point. The series flies along at the speed of a jet, and is as addictive as the box of Pringles you might select from the airline menu.

It’s been a big hit for Apple, and the reason for this is that it has a quality much prized by streaming services, what you might call the Mastermind factor: once you’ve started, you’ll finish. If Apple, Netflix or Amazon commission an eight-part series and most people don’t make it past episode two, it hurts. Those unwatched eps cost just as much as the others. Once you’re hooked on Hijack, you can no more bail out of the series than jump out of the plane with a parachute. (One of the few things that doesn’t happen during the beleaguered flight.)

The genre itself, airplane-based thrillers, has a long history. It reached an early peak in the 1970s with the Airport series, based on the 1968 novel by Arthur Hailey. Airport, Airport 1975, Airport ’77 and The Concorde: Airport ’79 are all distant relatives of Hijack. The films in turn spawned the brilliant Zucker brothers parody Airplane! (1980), which was promptly followed by Airplane II: The Sequel.

What the makers of Hijack realise is that, if you ignore the parody and go back to the original source, the basic elements are still fully intact. Does it have anything to say about the human condition? Frankly, no. Do all the multifarious plot twists plot make sense? Well I don’t want to give away any spoilers but in the penultimate episode there’s a shark-jumping moment involving a character you haven’t even met when you find yourself thinking, “What? Really?!”

But that hardly matters. Hijack has got a dramatic beginning, a tense middle and an exciting end – which by the way, is given full Hollywood production values – and oodles of jeopardy for all concerned.

And it’s got Idris Elba! Idris is a proper action hero, but the secret of his appeal isn’t that he can handle himself in a fight, which he obviously can. It’s his air of preternatural calm. While all others are panicking, he’s thinking. The first thing he says to the hijackers is, “I want to help you.” He doesn’t, but he knows it will wrong-foot them. Clever lad.

Hijack is co-created and co-written by George Kay, who was also responsible for the Netflix hits Lupin and Criminal. Another clever lad. I met George a few years ago and he reminded me that when I was running TalkBack in the late nineties he was a lowly runner. Yikes! Was I polite to him when asking for a cup of coffee, I asked nervously? He assured me that I was. Thank goodness for that. He’s now one of the hottest drama writers in the business, and after Hijack he’ll be hotter still.

Peter Fincham is co-founder of Expectation TV. Previously he was Managing Director of Talkback, Controller of BBC One and Director of Television at ITV.