The premise is as simple as the title. Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp) seeks to avenge the memory of her father, David, who was wrongfully framed for terrorist crimes. So she returns, years after the event, to the scene of her childhood trauma, targeting different people in her "burn book" of betrayal, every week edging ever closer to Victoria Grayson – her father's mistress who finally put him away and exiled his daughter to an institution.
Initially, Revenge reeled you in with its sudsy, surface allure. Early episodes suggested it was just another slice of Dynasty-style melodrama. All the usual ingredients are there: an arch voice-over, knowing glances (hidden behind glacial smiles), loaded one-liners and an abundance of well bred, Cape Cod jawlines and heavily Botoxed foreheads. And in its Hamptons setting we have an appropriately lush mise-en-scene cum gilded cage where The Beautiful People Who Dress In Pastels live.
But while Revenge is appropriately picket fence idyllic, with plenty of panoramic shots of the white-sand beach and some heavy-duty furniture-porn – by episode five I found myself mumbling "PHWOAR! Look at those cupboards!" – as the series has picked up pace, deeper themes of power and class have emerged.
It feels like we're slowly building towards an epic showdown of the Queen Bees: Omniscient Emily and Omnipresent Victoria. Although apparently coming from opposite sides of the ring, what's driving them is a shared memory of Emily's father. The trauma of his loss (and all the unraveling that came after it) is what accounts for their ability to harden their hearts at will. When Daniel asks his mother Victoria "What happened to you to make you feel so threatened all the time?" (episode eight, Treachery) he's goading the audience into muttering "If you only knew…' into their warm Chardonnay.
(As a side note, just compare Victoria's controlled, bitter final words to Lydia (episode five, Guilt) to Emily's rebuffing of Jack's advances (episode six, Intrigue) to see how similarly they operate.)
From a class perspective, however, the two are at opposite sides of a spectrum. As Emily's backstory is revealed, we see not only how committed she is to avenging her father through graft, but how it puts the focus on Victoria's corrupt, old money values. It's a tale as old as time, but considering recent events, her mission to destroy crooked empires has an air of Occupy style payback about it: just consider her targets of a sleazy investor and a crooked senator (episode two, Trust and episode three, Betrayal). But Emily's single mindedness is as admirable as it is hysterical and paranoid – remember her FBI-featuring dream sequence from the start of episode three?
It all adds to the feeling that Revenge is not just Gossip Girl For Grown Ups (despite the distracting presence of Eric Van Der Woodsen) or Desperate Housewives Redux but rather, with its use of a menacing score and noirish lighting, something like Douglas Sirk directing The Life And Loves of a She-Devil.
Equally intriguing are the fan suggestions that we should perhaps question Emily's narrative voice. Spending her life post-dad under the watch of a corrupt child psychologist and her teenage years in a violent institution could skewer anyone's perspective – let alone someone left with the burden of their father's apparent misdemeanors. Could her tale be revealed as more illusory than real? Frankly, I wouldn't put it past the show. The thing is: we're pretty sure it would pull it off with aplomb. And plenty of heavily orchestrated incidental music and mood lighting, of course.
