The biggest question going into Season 3 of The Cleaning Lady was how Miranda Kwok, who adapted the Argentinian series of the same name, and co-showrunner Jeannine Renshaw was going to handle Adan Canto’s death. At the time the show started shooting in December, after the writers’ and actors’ strikes, Canto was still hopeful that he could join the show at some point during the season. But that didn’t come to pass, as he died from appendiceal cancer in early January. Can the show survive his death?
THE CLEANING LADY SEASON 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Outside a warehouse, Thony De La Rosa (Élodie Yung) looks at her phone, when she’s approached by two men on motorcycles.
The Gist: As the motorcycles get close to hitting her, people in masks get out and one shoots a gun over their heads. Thony shows them a pendant that’s the symbol of a powerful cartel. When they ask her where she got it, she says, “Arman Morales” (the late Adan Canto), and she gets pistol whipped.
Two days earlier, Thony is at home with her son Luca (Sebastien and Valentino LaSalle); also living there is her nephew Chris (Sean Lew), whom she took in after Chris’ mother Fiona (Martha Millan), Thony’s sister-in-law, got deported back to the Philippines. With Arman’s help, Thony has arranged a private flight to get Fiona back to Las Vegas under the radar. Fiona is concerned that the trip won’t be safe, but Thony assures her she’ll get back to her son and daughter — who’s staying with her father — safely.
In the meantime, Arman’s wife Nadia (Eva De Dominici) gets wind that their plane is being taken out without her okay, and immediately drives to the airport to see what’s going on.
When Thony gets there, she sees drugs being loaded onto the plane, an arrangement that surprises her. Suddenly not only do armed thugs roll up and start shooting at Arman and the people loading the plane, police cars also speed to the scene. Nadia pulls up and Thony gets in her car so they can speed away. Neither knows exactly what happened to Arman.
Nadia, no fan of Thony’s as she has gotten closer to Arman, blames Thony for Arman’s disappearance, but later that night Thony approaches her to see if they can team up to look for him. While Nadia has exhausted every avenue she can think of, Thony suggests that they visit his parents, whom he hasn’t spoken to in over 20 years. While Arman’s father isn’t interested in finding his son, his mother runs out and gives the women the pendant, a gift to Arman’s father from the cartel that was connected to his side of the family.
In Manila, Fiona meets up with Paolo (JB Tadena), whom she dated right before she left for the U.S., without telling him that she was leaving. She not only tells him that Chris is his son, but she needs his help to let local criminals know that she does not deal drugs and Thony is not with her. This is after thugs looking for Thony busted into her parents’ house and threatened the three of them at gunpoint.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We still think The Cleaning Lady is Breaking Bad meets Good Girls. We also cited The Cleaner before the show’s first season, but it doesn’t seem that Thony cleans things up as much anymore.
Our Take: The gap between the start of shooting, and Canto’s intention to return, and Canto’s death is what led to Canto’s character, Arman, to be in this limbo state. He’s missing after the shootout, and Thony and Nadia have no idea if he’s dead or just hiding out. We see glimpses of Canto at the beginnings of that airport hangar scene, but those could have been shot a while ago and a scene built around them, or there could have been some CGI that put Canto in the scene. It’s certainly an awkward situation, but if you understand that Kwok and company didn’t know if they’d get Canto back at the time they started breaking those early stories, you understand why they went in that direction.
We’re pretty sure that at some point in Season 3, Arman will either disappear for good or be found dead. This leaves the show without the central relationship that drove a lot of the action and the drama. Yes, Kwok and her staff are finding other ways to keep the state of peril Thony is in at a high level; with her continuing to try to get Fiona back to the U.S., she ends up being in the presence of a cartel bigwig named Ramona Sanchez (Kate del Castillo). We think Ramona is Arman’s aunt, but the circumstances are so muddily explained that we’ve listened to that explanatory scene four times and still aren’t sure what the connection is. However that plays out, though, it feels like the story won’t be nearly as strong as it would have with Thony and Arman still being together.
Our Season 1 concern, that the show will just be a lot of guns and explosions and peril and not a lot of commentary about immigration and healthcare, proved to be accurate. However, we were also fine with The Cleaning Lady being shallow but full of tension. We’re just not sure if the death of Canto is going to send the show into story directions that are just going to seem increasingly ridiculous.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: A child protective services case worker comes to Thony’s door and tells her that Luca has to be removed from the house due to a missed check-in visit that Thony never knew about.
Sleeper Star: Kate del Castillo has been fun to watch in her previous projects, so her character Ramona may turn out to be a worthy adversary/ally of Thony.
Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing sticks out, but the shootout scene was very confusing to watch, likely because a body double was needed to play Arman during it.
Our Call: STREAM IT. There are still a lot of tense moments in The Cleaning Lady, but without Adan Canto as Arman, we’re not sure the show will be able to sustain that tension for the entire season.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Cleaning Lady’ Season 3 On Fox, Where Thony Looks For Arman While Trying To Bring Fiona Back From The Philippines appeared first on Decider.