TEMPLE: Mark Strong in a Black-Comedy Crime Mash-Up

Sometimes no matter what a person does, a merciless fate hangs over them. They may struggle, fight, even break the law, but it is all for naught when the cards were dealt long ago and the outcome has been written in indelible ink. Such is the unlucky hero of the series Temple, produced for the British network Sky.

Daniel Milton (Mark Strong) is a respected physician, husband, and father. He leads a peaceful, stable life, seeming to embody the ideal of a gifted member of British society whose conduct sets an example for others. Yet the idyll is built on lies. The man leads a double life, and his wife hides from the world a wasting illness that worsens by the day.

When Milton finally learns the truth, he will stop at nothing to find a cure for her ailment. He crosses every boundary to restore her health—even staging her death to gain the time and peace necessary to conduct his research.

Temple begins at the moment of the hero’s apparent mourning, as he feigns grief for his wife’s loss while in reality keeping her unconscious in a bunker beneath a subway station.

To pay for the drugs he needs, he moonlights treating shady characters in his makeshift clinic, collecting substantial fees. Milton is not alone in his struggle: he can always count on the support of the mentally troubled, apocalypse-believing Lee (Daniel Mays) and his wife’s friend, also a doctor, Anna (Carice van Houten).

Although the series is based on the premise introduced in the Norwegian Valkyrien, it remains quintessentially British to the core. The hero wears impeccably tailored suits, the camera occasionally surveys London streets under characteristic island weather, and over eight episodes it presents a gallery of characters reminiscent of those in Guy Ritchie’s earlier works. At its heart, Temple is a bitter story of coping with the loss of a loved one—stitched together with black-comedy seams often used to portray gangsters who treat themselves as masters of the universe, yet are in truth mere members of The Olsen Gang in spirit.

For example, alongside the main plot runs an episode featuring a schemer who, in the midst of a robbery, abandons his accomplices, takes the loot, and must now hide with the cash.

In pursuit are the mother of one of the captured thieves and her lover, a man with a seedy past and unenviable looks. This comedy of errors—full of absurd digressions and brutal deeds—tells us everything about the world Temple depicts: a field of hypocrisy where beneath a polished veneer, on the fringes of a modern city and in its underground, an unforgiving struggle for survival rages.

Sky’s series thus combines crime drama and comedy with appropriate respect—though with a predictably conventional finale.

In productions of this type one almost listens for the chuckle of fate, and that is precisely the sound that accompanies our hero’s life. Moreover, the creators pace the narrative slowly, stretching certain events to the breaking point. The drama driven by two main threads stalls for a long time, only speeding up near the end of the season—suggesting not a deliberate choice but rather a lack of ideas for further development.

What began as a promising concept—one that could have served as the starting point for a more serious conversation—ends up as mere genre play and a recapitulation of familiar plot devices.

The creators clearly aspire to say something more, to present British society in a new light, but it concludes as a straightforward, if competently told, story. Temple is simply one of many tales that one watches with interest, only to shelve promptly once the final credits roll.