“This is our time – stop sitting it out!”
“You’re just afraid!”
“Don’t let the dickheads define you!”
“You’re too easy on everyone else – and too hard on yourself!”
Such dialogue – and this is taken from one scene, between the heroine of Little Voice and her best friend – should come with a health warning. I thought it best to put it up front so we all know what we’re letting ourselves in for.
Little Voice is the latest offering from newbie streaming platform Apple+ TV – a nine-part drama about a struggling twentysomething singer-songwriter called Bess (“the Mess!”), played with commitment and a good heart by Brittany O’Grady, who is trying to make it in New York. Unless it is part of a covert corporate strategy to break into the antiemetics market – in which case, Apple, you nailed it, and I will take a bottleful of your most beautifully designed and overpriced tablets immediately – Little Voice is little short of a horror show.
Much of each half-hour episode is spent following Bess through the (gorgeously shot) streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn as she scribbles in her notebook; is alternately inspired or crushed by the gifts of the street musicians she passes every 100 yards on her way to teaching piano to talentless rich kids; holds singalongs at retirement homes; and waitresses at a club, gazing longingly at the stage and wishing that there were some way she could overcome her Grand Humiliation. Which is failing to “go over” at a previous attempt to share her musical gift with a non-paying audience at a bar a while back. It’s all of a piece with the enduringly low-stakes feel of the series.
All the markers you might expect are dutifully hit. Bess has a difficult family life. She takes care of her autistic brother Louie (Kevin Valdez), and her father (Chuck Cooper) is a recovering alcoholic who promptly relapses when he forgets the words to a song. Oversensitivity to the ordinary vicissitudes of the musical life runs in the family. Then again, he does have to deliver lines like: “You take with you the part of the story that you focus on,” so we should perhaps not judge him too harshly.
She has a beloved best friend, Prisha (Shalini Bathina) with whom she shares an unfeasibly well-appointed, unfeasibly brownstone apartment and helps run interference between Prisha’s true sexuality and her – yes – marriage-obsessed Indian parents.
There is an early meet-cute in the storage locker Bess rents as her creative space, with love interest Ethan (Sean Teale). He is English and horrible and yet … he is drawn to her and her music. “So special,” he says – he actually says, out loud, with his mouth, after learning of her Grand Humiliation. “I’d only want more.” He is a … I’m not sure. I’m going to say photographer. They both think they would have been better off practising their art 50 years ago. “I think my stuff seems … earnest,” says Bess, earnestly. “We live in such a cynical time,” says Ethan, with his actual mouth again. “I think that takes guts.”
With a show so predictable, it cannot count as a spoiler to reveal that Ethan turns out to have a girlfriend and that an alternative love interest, nice guy Samuel (Colton Ryan) soon presents himself – and yet cannot truly compete with Ethan’s brooding magnificence (AKA part-time negging).
There is another on-stage humiliation – this time in front of Ethan, which on previous form should put her into an asylum – but generally speaking, Bess’s talent makes people gasp, weep and prostrate themselves before her, even if producers just don’t, like, really get her, you know? We know. We know.
