Sirens is the latest in what’s become a long streaming-service line of glamorous beach-read melodramas.
Like its predecessors, the series is at once enthralled with, and disgusted by, the well-off, whose lives are full of bizarre customs, unnatural social dynamics, and deep dark secrets that speak to their (supposed) malevolence.
Based on her 2011 play, Maid showrunner Molly Smith Metzler’s five-part limited series, premiering May 22, is so soapy that one would be forgiven for mistaking its early morning island mist for suds. Its corny frothiness is epitomized by its relentless and insufferable musical theme of choral singers going “Ooooh aaaah ooooh.”
Nonetheless, as far as sagas of the untrustworthy rich and famous go, it’s an imminently watchable tale of greed, ambition, deception, and trauma (So. Much. Trauma), aided in no small part by a big, bold, charming performance from Meghann Fahy.
Arriving a month after she established her headliner bona fides with Drop, Fahy stars as Devon, a Bills-loving Buffalo native who upon leaving jail (where she spent the night thanks to another DUI) comes home to discover an Edible Arrangements delivery on her stoop.
So infuriated is Devon by this gift from her MIA sister Simone (House of the Dragons’ Milly Alcock)—who’s left Devon in charge of caring for their dementia-addled father Bruce (Bill Camp)—that she hauls it 17 hours to the lavish Martha’s Vineyard estate where Simone now works and lives. Upon arriving, she’s stunned to learn that her younger sibling is the right-hand woman of the compound’s matriarch Michaela Kell (Julianne Moore), whom she calls “Kiki” and dotes on with a cheery intensity that, along with the general bonkers vibe, immediately makes Devon think that the place is a cult.
Michaela is a soft-spoken kook who has a way of hypnotically entrancing those in her orbit. Though she was once a high-powered lawyer, she now spends her time running a wildlife sanctuary with a focus on peregrine falcons (like her favorite, Barnaby) and hosting opulent events like her upcoming Labor Day gala.
Her employees, led by property manager Jose (Felix Solis), treat her every wish as their command, but they’re a generally unhappy lot who have been silenced by NDAs and talk smack about Simone via staff-wide group text chats. In long flowy dresses and with a dreamily deranged expression affixed to her face, Michaela is a weirdo upper-cruster who exists in such rarified air that she appears to be suffering from oxygen deprivation, and she rules her roost like a gentle tyrant, all while doting disturbingly on Simone, whom she’s so close with that, at one point, she sleeps with her in her bed.
Devon arrives in this prim-and-proper pastel palace like an uncouth wrecking ball, cursing up a storm in her short mini-dress and work boots (Simone says, correctly, that she looks like a roadie). She promptly upsets Simone, who doesn’t want the upcoming weekend spoiled by her big sister, and who immediately resonates as an ungrateful and off-putting twerp.
That impression isn’t altered by the subsequent revelation that Simone has really fled her dad, who in the wake of her mom’s passing treated her so badly that she had to go to court to escape him. Devon and Simone’s history of neglect, abandonment, and suffering is one of many mysteries teased by Sirens, with Metzler also introducing the idea that Michaela murdered the first wife of her husband Peter (Kevin Bacon), a hedge fund bigwig who rarely sees his two grown kids from his initial marriage and who seems only somewhat happy putting up with Michaela’s elaborate whims and overbearing behavior.
There’s plenty of plot in Sirens, which additionally involves Simone’s romance with Peter’s wealthy best friend Ethan (Glenn Howerton)—which she’s keeping from Michaela—and Devon’s habit of dealing with stress by sleeping around, be it with a random ferryman, a landscaper, her married high-school ex Raymond (Josh Segarra), or hunky boat captain Morgan (Trevor Salter).
Alcoholism, child abuse, suicide, depression, anxiety, and every other hang-up under the sun embellish this scenario, as does death, beginning with the untimely and crazy demise of Barnaby. In response, Michaela stages an over-the-top funeral for the bird that allows her female acolytes, all of whom dress in bright and sunshiny floral dresses, to demonstrate their fealty like the unnerving Stepford Wives they resemble.
Sirens’ title is an S.O.S. code word used by Devon and Simone, and yet even once they’re together, they find that they’re in various sorts of trouble and incapable—or unwilling—to help each other. Duplicity reigns as the gala nears, with everyone sneaking around and doing not-nice things behind each other’s backs, as well as struggling to cope with past misery and slights that have bred lasting resentment.
Metzler whips things up into a suitably dizzy frenzy. Moreover, she presents a collection of characters who are easy and fun to dislike, beginning with Michaela, an unabashed creep whose tab-keeping and mantra-repeating (“Hey Hey”) marks her as a condescending and manipulative villain. Simone isn’t much better, coming across as a sycophant whose adoration for Michaela is gross regardless of the fact that, you know, she’s searching for a surrogate mom just like Michaela views her as the daughter she never had.
Devon is the hot mess that ignites Sirens, and Fahy is so good as the chaotic protagonist—who gave up her own life to raise Simone and care for her dad, neither of whom appreciates it—that the material naturally, and fittingly, assumes her perspective.
Metzler keeps things complicated enough that it’s possible to root for any number of her characters, at least temporarily, but ultimately her tale falls back on a rather straightforward message about the value of selflessness and the concurrent ugliness and cruelty of putting shallow personal interests ahead of others’ welfare.
There is, of course, the usual hypocrisy of making Michaela and Peter’s hoity-toity world as enchanting and ravishing as possible and then decrying it as empty and its inhabitants as selfish and repugnant materialists. Still, it’s reasonably intriguing pulp elevated by its disparate players, whether it’s Fahy’s frustrated firebrand, Solis’ cagey fixer, Segarra’s jealous d—-e, or Lauren Weedman’s long-suffering chef Patrice.
If it ran longer or had dreams of becoming a multi-season affair, Sirens might have quickly run out of steam. At a concise five episodes, however, it proves a satisfyingly juicy concoction fit for a summer binge.
The post Netflix’s ‘Sirens’ Will Be Your Summer Beach-Read TV Obsession appeared first on The Daily Beast.
