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“SELBY—DON’T ANSWER.” These are the words that flash across Costello Jones’ cellphone screen when, in the debut episode of HBO’s excellent new dramedy Rain Dogs, she gets a call from Florian Selby. A working-class single mother, aspiring author, and peepshow dancer who has just been evicted from her London apartment, along with her adorable 10-year-old daughter, Iris (Fleur Tashjian), Costello (Daisy May Cooper) knows that letting Selby (Jack Farthing) back into her life would be a mistake. But it’s hard to stay away from her sometime best friend—a self-described “classical homosexual” from a posh family who’s just completed a year-long stint in prison—when he alone is willing and able to dig her and Iris out of desperate circumstances.
Named after Tom Waits’ booze-soaked record about “people who sleep in doorways,” Rain Dogs, premiering March 6, chronicles Costello’s desperate attempts to put a roof over her daughter’s head—and Selby’s desperate attempts to keep them both in his life, even if it means sabotaging her relationships, testing her new-found sobriety, and rooting against her success. This makes him pretty unpopular with the other two constants in Costello’s life: Gloria (Ronke Adekoluejo)—a pal who makes her first appearance in the show passed out in a telephone box, wearing last night’s going-out clothes—and the proudly perverted, ailing artist Lenny (Adrian Edmondson), for whom Costello performs unsavory odd jobs. The only undamaged soul of the bunch is Iris, whose normality may be a testament to her mum’s shoestring parenting. For Selby as well as Costello, the little girl clearly represents the purest love they’ve ever experienced.
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