Sorting out a relationship in ‘Friends and Crocodiles’

“Friends and Crocodiles,” airing Saturday on BBC America, is the first of a brace of tangentially related TV movies written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff, who earlier made the excellent, Emmy-winning “The Lost Prince.” (Its companion, “Gideon’s Daughter,” airs a month from now.) The film earns a few points at the top for attempting to make a drama out of subject matter unusual for a television film, the nonsexual yet almost romantic relations of people who work together. (It is, of course, quite usual subject matter for sitcoms.) It squanders that extra credit, however, on a script that spans decades -- it’s also a kind of social history of Britain in the 1980s and ‘90s -- but goes nowhere: What passes for a climactic revelation, or at least a moment of understanding, is so weakly supported by what’s gone on before that I was left feeling quite exasperated.

Damian Lewis, who was as much as anyone the star of the HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers,” plays Paul, a sort of Gatsby figure -- that he is indeed a Gatsby figure is made clear by a character saying, “He really has turned into Gatsby” -- with Richard Branson overtones. A wealthy self-made man, he lives on a sprawling estate where he throws big parties and collects what we are meant to regard as people of yet unrealized potential -- there’s a poet, a politician, a linked pair of artists, a “revolutionary,” a journalist, a scholar, a girl in a wheelchair. Their eventual successes underscore Paul’s eye for talent, though a mere television viewer may have some trouble discerning it.

One day, Paul stops a young woman named Lizzie (Jodhi May of “Tipping the Velvet”) who has the habit of walking on his grounds during her lunch hour, and perhaps because she is as regular as clockwork in this he offers her a job as his assistant. (If Paul is Gatsby, Lizzie is some sort of cross between Nick and Daisy -- the watcher and the watched. Although the journalist, who has been given the Dickensian name of Sneath and is played by Robert Lindsay, is Nick as well.) Sitting straight-backed with knees together, busily working away at we-don’t-know-what on her little red portable typewriter, she is an Apollonian force to Paul’s Dionysian, as Nietzsche would have it, or a little bit country to his little bit rock ‘n’ roll, as Donny and Marie would have it.

Paul is a visionary who foresees not only the Computer Age (way back in the 1980s!) but also that what the country really needs is “a chain of quality bookshops, perhaps with a coffee shop tucked inside.” He also has some ideas about the titular crocodiles and what secrets their survival from prehistoric times might hold.

He and Lizzie have their ups and downs and ins and outs. The film, which is both admiring and critical of Big Business (while somewhat fantastical in regard to its actual workings), follows them through boom, bubble and bust, as she rises in the corporate world and he takes a side trip to back-to-the-earth hippie polygamy. All this transpires with a fatal lack of context. Lizzie gets married, for instance, but her husband, who is glimpsed twice, has no lines. Who is he? Why’s she marrying him? Poliakoff might say it’s beside the point, but it’s difficult to know why Paul and Lizzie keep coming together when we don’t understand who they are apart.

They also appear to be above consequences. Worlds collapse around them with only transitory effect. Nor can age wither them -- a quarter of a century passes without their getting visibly older. We might imagine this is because they’re meant partly as symbols, like the beautiful old light fixtures a dot-com-mad CEO throws out the window in the name of modernity, but it doesn’t make them any more convincing as people.

The best reason to watch is May, who does everything she can with every moment she’s on screen.

*

‘Friends and Crocodiles’

Where: BBC America

When: 10 p.m. Saturday

Ratings: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)