Summer is upon us. The weather is getting warmer, the sun is about to shine brighter, and the world will be inviting us to enjoy the change in season. And I can’t wait to hunker down inside, crank up the air conditioning, set up a permanent residence on my couch, and pretend “outside” doesn’t exist as I watch endless marathons of new TV shows.
Why go outside, sweat, and get sunburned when you have a subscription to Netflix to keep you busy?
Summer doesn’t just mean a change in weather. It also heralds a shift in TV “vibes,” for lack of better description. In other words, Trashy TV Season is here, and I can’t wait to become one with my sofa and max out my credit card ordering Uber Eats while enjoying it.
Netflix’s Sirens couldn’t be more well-timed. Was there a huge missed opportunity that the show takes place over Labor Day weekend, but is premiering now over Memorial Day weekend? Yes, but Julianne Moore is on our TV screen in a juicy soap opera, so we can’t complain too much.
In Sirens, Moore plays a rich woman who lives in…well, it’s not quite clear where the show takes place, but it has Hamptons/Nantucket/Martha’s Vineyard vibes.
Her name is Michaela, and she’s that mixture of fabulous and creepy that happens when a person becomes unbelievably wealthy. For all the money and influence that she’s accumulated, she’s become infantile, incapable of doing anything on her own. So she has an assistant who is attached to her hip named Simone, played by House of the Dragon‘s Milly Alcock.
Simone is obsessed with Michaela, and has basically changed everything about herself so that she can fit in with the pastel dress-wearing and identical blowout-having women in Michaela’s circle. She’s so drastically committed to this new identity that when her estranged sister, Meghann Fahy’s Devon, arrives at the mansion to check in on her, she’s so concerned that she decides to stay and try to deprogram her.
Devon is what a normal person might consider a “hot mess,” which is to say that she is a fantastic TV character: crass, crude, unfiltered, and sex-obsessed. I don’t think there’s a single frame of the series in which her mascara is not smudged.
She is suspicious of Michaela, Michaela is threatened by her, and Simone is caught in the middle. The show, with its focus on the dynamics between privileged people and the salt-of-the-earth women in their orbit who are skeptical of them, reminds of last year’s Nicole Kidman series The Perfect Couple. That show was objectively terrible, yet was irresistibly addicting. Sirens is just as tantalizing, but it’s so much better quality. Think of it as “Perfect Couple, but, like, good.”
Speaking of Nicole Kidman series that are horrible but you can’t stop watching them anyway, Nine Perfect Strangers is back! I remember when Season 1 came out during the pandemic. It was clearly greenlit during the Hollywood spree to make the next Big White Little Fires Everywhere Lotus Lies series. Despite its starry cast and buzzy premise—Kidman as, essentially, a cult leader—it was so, so bad. I watched every episode in one sitting. Obsessed.
Nine Perfect Strangers Season 2, which is now out, is, if you can imagine, even worse than the first season. I am loving it. I wish there was an easy way to explain the appeal of a truly terrible, trashy TV show, the kind that you’ll watch before whatever future Emmy-winning series that is actually worth your time. But Nine Perfect Strangers is the epitome of that.
There’s another show that has the same “female-led soapy thriller” vibes as Sirens and Nine Perfect Strangers that’s coming around the bend: Prime Video’s The Better Sister, starring Jessica Biel and Elizabeth Banks as siblings with an acrimonious relationship who become implicated in a murder investigation. It’s the kind of series that begs for an Overacting Olympics from its two stars, and, by the looks of the trailer, Biel and Banks rise to the occasion. Gold medals all around.
This isn’t just a season for scripted series, either. Summer Trash TV Season is also the perfect time for reality TV to distract from things like “being productive” and “contributing to society.”
The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives arrives miraculously on time to fulfill that role. I love a reality show like this, a series that is somehow both incredibly boring and absolutely captivating. You can watch it while folding laundry and scrolling through Instagram, fully shut off your brain and not pay attention for minutes at a time, and yet miss nothing.
Some people get excited for summer because it’s time to go to the beach or tan by the pool. I get excited for couch. Thank god, summer TV season is finally here.
The post Summer Trashy TV Season Is Finally Here appeared first on The Daily Beast.
