Chloe Sevigny Packs Heat and a Prosthetic Penis in 'Hit & Miss'

Neil Jordan isn't involved in "Hit & Miss," a six-episode UK series making its US premiere on DirecTV this Wednesday, July 11th at 10pm -- he's got his own television project, "The Borgias," on Showtime. But "Hit and Miss" (create by Paul Abbott, of "Shameless) does feel a little like a creation patchworked together from pieces of Jordan's films -- a touch of "The Butcher Boy," a dab of "Mona Lisa" and, of course, a hefty dose of "The Crying Game." It brings together two types of characters he's shown an affinity for -- children and transwomen, four of the former and one of the latter united by the death of someone they all loved.

The kids are siblings who range in age from six-year-old Leonie (Roma Christensen) to 16-year-old Riley (Karla Crome). They live on a smallholding farm in the Yorkshire countryside with a few chickens, some pigs and an uneasy relationship with their landlord John (Vincent Regan). Their mother Wendy just died of cancer, and they have different fathers -- one of them, Ryan, who's since made the transition to become Mia (Chloë Sevigny), a pre-op woman who learns she has a 11-year-old son who shares her former name and that she's been named the family's legal guardian at the start of the series.

Mia isn't just an unusual choice for caretaker because of the changes she's made since she was a part of Wendy's life -- she's also a professional assassin who's been living the kind of solitary, disciplined life pop culture's contract killers inevitably do, training relentlessly in her spare, spacious Manchester loft apartment between assignments and meetings with her boss Eddie (Peter Wight).

Mia is a ridiculous creation, which works in her favor -- she becomes the touch of the fantastic that unmoors "Hit & Miss" and saves it from being a more mundane kind of quirky makeshift family drama. It's an effect amplified by the fact that Sevigny looks nothing like a man, even a former one who's been carefully learning to live as a woman and taking hormone pills for years. The show first introduces the character in a series of unveilings -- a hooded figure who shoots someone in a parking lot, then goes back to a car where she's shown to be a dark-haired woman who reapplies lipstick in the rearview mirror. And then we see her at home, changing her license plates and then stripping down for the shower to reveal -- yup, an intact penis.