Give credit to Liane Moriarty, the author who came to most people’s attention when HBO adapted her breakthrough novel, Big Little Lies: She’s a master of the hook, the plot device that immediately grabs one’s attention.
In Apples Never Fall, that hook involves the limited series’ marquee star: recent Oscar nominee Annette Bening (Nyad) in her first lead TV role as dissatisfied Florida mom and recent retiree Joy Delaney, first seen peddling a bike through the streets of sunny West Palm Beach, where she and husband Stan (Sam Neill), both former tennis pros, operated a family tennis academy for years. Cut to the bike, now minus its rider, with blood on the spokes and a basket of symbolic apples strewn across the road. Where is Joy? And why did Stan not report her disappearance for days?
Hooked yet? If only the follow-through were as riveting. Peacock is perhaps unwisely dropping the entire seven-episode season as a binge on one of the month’s, and year’s, most crowded Thursdays. (Among the competition for attention: Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour on Disney+, season premieres of Grey’s Anatomy and the relocated 9-1-1 on ABC, a new season of Peacock castoff Girls5Eva on Netflix, Max‘s political dramedy The Girls on the Bus). Spending too many consecutive hours in the company of the Delaneys tends to reinforce the thinness of the material and the whininess of the Delaney offspring, whose soapy subplots unravel while suspicion falls on Stan, who can’t imagine why Joy left so abruptly and where she might be. (Unless, of course, he had a hand in her departure.)
The juicy twists, cliffhangers and red herrings might be easier to digest if rolled out on a weekly basis. But the plot machinations become tiresome as the story continually and sometimes confusingly jumps between “then” and “now” to fill in the blanks of the Delaney family dysfunction, which becomes more apparent after Stan and Joy sell their struggling tennis academy and settle into a restless retirement. Into this uneasy empty-nest household arrives a mysterious young interloper: sultry Savannah (Georgia Flood), who knocks on their door one night in distress, with no ID or money, claiming to be fleeing an abusive relationship and relying on the kindness of these total strangers. Inexplicably, they let her in and allow her to stay.
Savannah, who cooks and cleans for her bemused benefactors, might as well be wearing a “catalyst” T-shirt, given the effect her bizarre presence in the house has on Joy and Stan’s grown (and unevenly cast) kids, each scarred by being raised in such a competitive environment: Troy (Jake Lacy of The White Lotus), the quintessential yuppie-jerk trader, divorced and carrying on with his boss’s wife; Brooke (Essie Randles), the responsible daughter who’s trying to keep her personal trainer business afloat; Logan (Conor Merrigan-Turner), the drifter who chose boats and a life at the marina over the tennis academy, and who’s thinking of relocating to Seattle with his girlfriend; and most clichéd, Amy (Community‘s Alison Brie), a neurotic hippie-dippy free spirit accurately called out as an “emotional chaos sinkhole.”
Everyone has issues, with each other and with the calculating Savannah, as their lives fall apart and secrets spill out like the proverbial apples before and after Joy’s disappearance. Bening is, as always, marvelous as a controlling mother who can’t help confiding in her new surrogate daughter, “Nobody can break your heart like your own children.” (Naturally, one of them is eavesdropping). Neill is every bit her match as her volatile partner, simmering in regret and apparent confusion as Stan watches his kids lose faith in his innocence.
I’ll leave it to the viewer to conclude if the climactic reveals are satisfying. To me, it all just felt a bit silly. But that’s the way the apples sometimes fall. I just wish it had all been a little riper.
Apples Never Fall, Limited Series Premiere (seven episodes), Thursday, March 14, Peacock
