Now that everyone has an iPhone, though, I feel like it’s every industry - no longer just lawyers, and no longer just high level employees. My BB would vibrate loudly on the table in the tiny studio apartment I lived in then, waking me up and causing stress.) (I mostly did this because - without fail! - we’d get what amounted to a spam digest alert every single morning at 4 AM. I remember feeling like a rebel by setting my BlackBerry to turn off automatically every weeknight from 12am to 6 am, and (gasp!) 10 PM to 8 AM on weekends. It was a sea change - before that you had to be sitting at a computer to log in to check your email. I'm going to have to watch episode two just to see what happens.Looking back - the BlackBerry hit the market when I was a second or third year in BigLaw. The high-profile head of a multinational PR and crisis-management firm – a firm that specialises in preventing embarrassing and humiliating public relations disasters – is going to Talented Mr Ripley her sexuality for the night. Only now, she takes this plan further: she’s roped in a woman from the accounts department, she tells Robyn, to pretend to be her partner. As she’s such a duplicitous PR type, she has decided to approximate the outfit of a lesbian too (“Does this make me look like a lesbian?” she asks. Wonderfully, just when I thought there was nothing more for the first episode of Flack to give, I realised it still had some left in the tank.Īt the start of the episode Robyn’s boss informs her she’s going to a benefit for lesbians that evening. One phone call for every newspaper's front page? Who could she possibly be calling? I mean, I get the “one phone call and I can have you killed” threat, but that's much easier, not least if she's including the FT. I genuinely thought about this for some time. “One phone call and I can have him on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow.” “You want him punished?” she asks his wife. Oh, and during this chat, for no reason I could fathom, Robyn offers to destroy her own client, which I’m fairly sure isn’t in the PR handbook. “The bathroom window!” says Robyn brightly.Īnd that’s it, as if she’d said that the butler showed her in. “Where did you come from?” the wife asks, but more with a touch more casualness that one would expect of someone addressing a home invader. I particularly enjoyed the moment when Robyn – on a mission to calm down the chef's wife after she learns about the latest affair – breaks into her house in order to get the calming started. In fact, the first episode of Flack had so many improbable moments I almost started liking it. The intern, meanwhile, is shown as being out of place in this glamorous, cutthroat world of PR because she a) has a haircut I’m almost certain was achieved by cutting around a mixing bowl and b) she’s dressed like Mrs Brown from Mrs Brown’s Boys. Thanks for that – there was almost a second there I had to deduce it from character, dialogue, nuance or acting. Well, I didn’t, because daddy plays golf with lots of important people.” Robyn’s snide, privileged assistant, for instance – a passive-aggressive Post-it note in human form – insults a new intern’s outfit, before adding of interns, “We all had to do it. She then gives a dressing-down on his male privilege. She refuses to be another notch on a bedpost that I can only imagine has been whittled down to a chopstick at this point. He may, she says, have slept with all the 2,579 other people in her office (I’m paraphrasing here), but she will not be number 2,580. To begin with, Robyn gives him both barrels. So how exactly do they end up in the hotel room together, you ask? Well, the chef gets a bit upset with the plan and so Robyn does what any self-respecting publicist with a randy client who can’t keep his pecker in his pants would do: she books them both into a hotel and cracks open the minibar to "calm him down". Robyn meets the chef in a bar to work on a devious plan involving sending the chef’s wife for a mammogram in order to scoop up the sympathy coverage and bury the affair story. I think it’s fair to say it was at the point some moments later – the two of them going at it like the clappers in a hotel bathroom – that I began to suspect we do not have another Sopranos on our hands. “Plus, you’re the only one in the office he hasn’t slept with.” “You’re the best we have,” she’s told by her boss.