“Sirens,” a five-part mini-series on Netflix, brims with trendy TV elements, a mythology-tinged beach drama with a weepy trauma plot and a poppy attention to cult sagas. It’s more summer fling than marriage material, but who doesn’t like to get away?
Meghann Fahy stars as the down-and-out Devon, who dresses in black, smokes cigarettes, has casual sexual encounters and tries to care for her ailing father with dementia in Buffalo. Milly Alcock is Simone, her little sister, a live-in assistant on Martha’s Vineyard whose outfits seem ripped from a Lilly Pulitzer lookbook. Devon arrives, unbidden, because she needs help, but she soon becomes worried that Simone is in a cult led by her employer, Kiki (Julianne Moore), an ethereal, overwhelming ex-lawyer married to a frustrated billionaire (Kevin Bacon).
“Sirens” is “White Lotus”-adjacent, thanks in part to its “rich people: they are actually very sad sometimes” elements and especially thanks Fahy, its lead and a “White Lotus” alumna. It shares an “Upstairs Downstairs” behind-the-scenes energy and a fascination with birds with “The Residence.” As in the dopey yet engrossing thriller “Paradise,” there is something unsettling and amiss about the luxury here. Every mysterious streaming drama needs a parade of famous faces, and “Sirens” gives us Moore, Bacon and Glenn Howerton. And as with dozens of other poor-little-rich-folks series, primo real estate is the backbone of the show.
Those are relatively chichi shows to resemble, but “Sirens” is perhaps more in keeping with trends from the other end of the prestige spectrum: It often feels like a Hallmark Channel movie.
“Sirens” swims from campy to grounded and back, feeling sometimes refreshingly unpredictable and other times confusingly disjointed. When the oddities amplify each other, the show takes on an eerie, alluring dreaminess. But then the show backs away from its boldest ideas, as if it had this bolder, grander plan and then just said, “Eh, never mind.”
The draw here is the goofy luminosity of it all and the commitment of the performances. It is also a show that could be told entirely through hair: Each perfect ponytail is an instant character biography; frizz stands in for personal failure; face-framing waves that crest right at the cheekbone might as well be a halo; and a stick-straight blowout cuts deeper than a knife in the back.
Margaret Lyons is a television critic at The Times, and writes the TV parts of the Watching newsletter.
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