‘Are you ready to plan the perfect murder?’
Growing up in the ’90s monoculture means that most of my cultural touchstones are pretty much the same as everyone else’s of my generation. Show me a 38-year-old and I’ll show you someone who knows every word to the theme song of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, someone who saw Titanic multiple times at the cinema, and someone who owned an Eminem album on CD. Occasionally, however, I return to something that had a huge impact on me personally, but seems to have been forgotten everywhere else. I watched Killer Net when it originally aired in May 1998. I had just turned 10. I finally had a TV in my bedroom. It was open season…
Scott Miller (Tam Williams) is a psychology student living in Brighton with his flatmates and couple, Joe (Paul Bettany) and Suzie (Emily Woof) – the former is studying law, whilst the latter is training to be a nurse. After Scott encounters Charlie (Kathy Brolly), a wild and unpredictable Irish girl, she introduces him to the titular Killer Net – a niche video game in which the aim is to stalk, catch and kill an innocent woman, and then get away with the crime. Things become complicated when a young woman actually is murdered on the streets of Brighton.
Written and created by Prime Suspect creator Lynda La Plante, Killer Net is a remarkably prescient take on the potential ills of social gameplay and obsession. It’s fascinating to look back now from an era in which the internet controls every aspect of our daily lives to a time when the world wide web was a burgeoning resource used sparingly and infrequently by society at large. I remember that period in which the internet really did feel like the modern day Wild West, before everything was corportised and monetised. While it’s important not to be too nostalgic for a time in which the dark corners of the internet were more easily accessible, it’s impossible not to get caught up in it all. Yes, the acting is over-the-top (I’m looking at you, Paul Bettany), and yes, the depiction of a ‘cool’ and ‘edgy’ student flat will probably look incredibly quaint to the youth of today, but there is no denying that Killer Net provides a snapshot into the ’90s counter culture at a time when it was on the verge of collapsing in on itself.
It’s nigh on impossible for me to divorce my opinion on Killer Net this time around from the visceral impact it had on me as a kid, but I can say with certainty that it hooked me in all over again. For anyone who thinks the well of ’90s nostalgia has run dry, this weird little curio is currently streaming on Amazon Prime (for some reason). Oh, and it also features Jason Orange of Take That as a drug-addled maniac. Ahh… the ’90s.
