Cristina Yang Fans Will Be Obsessed With Sandra Oh's New Badass Show
Grey's Anatomy is still going strong with Season 14, but for many fans, the show's heart came to an end at the end of Season 10 when longtime cast member Sandra Oh, who played Cristina Yang, left the show. Since her departure, there's not been another character like Yang on TV anywhere. That is, until now, as Oh brings her patented brand of ambition and spunk to her newest show, Killing Eve which begins on BBC America this Sunday, April 8, 2018. But what is Killing Eve about, and should Cristina fans tune in when it airs?
The answer to that second question is an unqualified yes. Though the show is on BBC America and is set in London, don't worry about Oh suddenly sounding all highfalutin. Her character, Eve Polastri, may have been born in the UK, but she grew up in New England, Connecticut to be specific, and has the American accent to prove it.
Oh's character, Eve, is happily married to a UK resident (Owen McDonell, of My Mother & Other Strangers) and settled, but sadly bored in her office job, as a company which provides temporary security to government witnesses. Eve wants to be investigating the crimes their clients are involved in, even when it's against the rules, and when they get a woman who was witness to her own boyfriend's assassination she can't help herself but start asking questions.
It turns out Eve has an absolute obsession with assassins, especially women assassins, and this job has all of the hallmarks of the one she's been tracking for the last couple of years. When the client is killed before Eve can get enough information, she's fired from the company, but not before her inquiries catch the attention of an MI-5 agent Carolyn (Fiona Shaw of Harry Potter fame). Next thing we know Eve has a new job: Secret Agent.
Meanwhile, our audience has been getting to know Eve's quarry to be, and she's not someone to be messed with. Villanelle (played by The White Princess' Jodie Comer) is described early on as a psycho, and the description is apt. This is a woman who clearly comes from some sort of Black Widow like situation (her handlers at one point suggest her training in the killing arts is Russian), but unlike Marvel's brainwashed coterie of female murderers for hire, Villanelle relishes what she does for a living. She makes killing fun, whether it's a silent knife in Austria, a hairpin to the eye in Italy, or poisons in France. Her love of French fashions doesn't hurt either.
As Eve, Oh brings a Yang like ambition and tenacity to her manhunt, as she slowly pieces together that she actually met Villanelle, and begins the dogged work of putting together the proof she needs to take the woman down. Meanwhile, in her Parisian hideaway, Villanelle learns there an entire investigation team focused slowly on bringing her down, and has as much fun playing cat-and-mouse with her new hunter as she does killing people under their noses.
The show is written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, known for comedies such as Fleabag. As Eve, Oh is blessedly sunny where so many of these detective-vs-serial killers are dour and gritty. And while Villanelle may seem like the traditional honeypot femme fatale, like Eve, she's merely another woman trapped in a male-dominated field, underestimated and held back by lazy male superiors. Let's just hope they don't take each other down too quickly because this is a show that solidly deserves more than a single season.
Killing Eve premieres on BBC America on Sunday, April 8, 2018, at 8 p.m. ET.
