I have a theory that TV shows nowadays are all tonal variations on either The White Lotus, Boiling Point or possibly Yellowstone, but honestly I haven’t seen the latter. You might wish I had supporting evidence, but isn’t that what a theory is?
Anyway, this week’s pick is definitely in the White Lotus mould. Sirens (Netflix, from Thursday 22 May) unfolds over Labor Day weekend in the Lloyd Neck peninsula of upstate New York, where a wealthy group of guests descend on a beachside estate for a charity gala. The raptor conservation organisation (think falcons, not velociraptors) is run by socialite Michaela Kell, a wellness-y guru who expects obedience from everyone around her. But preparations are interrupted by Devon, a chaotic falafel waitress who has come to save her sister Simone, Michaela’s assistant. Devon comes to believe Simone has been brainwashed, and that they’re mixed up in a murder, or several. It’s a long weekend.
They’re serving cult, obviously, in addition to shrimp. Michaela – “Kiki” to her inner circle – is an insidious emotional vampire. She’s feared more than revered by the locals, and has the police on a leash. She concludes ceremonies and conversations with the weird, pseudo-spiritual mantra “Hey hey”, as if attempting to summon the spirit of the chicken from Moana. When Devon asks the exploited employees why they don’t complain, they clam up harder than the quahogs in the Long Island Sound.
Come for the set-up, stay for the execution. Milly Alcock plays Simone as a smothered scream. Her Barbie-perfect factotum is across everything from beach seating for bird funerals to misting Kiki’s underwear with lavender – and composing her boss’s sexts to her husband. Meanwhile, Meghann Fahy, whom we’ve seen in – huh, The White Lotus – has acres of fun as Devon. “A transient person carrying hot garbage” is how a member of staff describes her when she turns up at the manicured estate, having spent the night in jail, in the middle of a day that sees her sleeping with two separate men on different boats. She’s the finest hot mess to hit our screens in an age.
Then there’s Julianne Moore as the titular siren. In the last few years, Moore has enjoyed sinister turns. There’s the Todd Haynes film May December, in which she weaponised childlike, cutesy-pie manipulations to control others. As Michaela, she devours relatively spare screen time to portray an enigmatic, hostile cult leader who seethes aggression beneath wellness bromides and a too-wide smile. Devon is drawn in to her spell while fully conscious of the danger. Her monstrousness is alluring, which is the point. “What would I do without you?” Michaela purrs disingenuously in one scene. “You’d hire a new assistant,” replies Simone, in a Freudian slip of honesty.
The pedigree shines throughout. Sirens is based on a play by Molly Smith Metzler, and has an initial block of episodes directed by Nicole Kassel, who won Emmys for HBO’s Watchmen. For Michaela’s weed-toking, elusive husband Peter, Kassel reunites with functionally immortal film star Kevin Bacon. The pair last worked together on Kassel’s superb 2004 debut The Woodsman. It’s nice to associate Bacon with something other than EE adverts isn’t it? That was rough for a while.
Where The White Lotus uses its glossy veneer to satirise our zeitgeist, Sirens digs at something deeper. Troubled female relationships, to be specific. There is the brittle intimacy of the boss-assistant relationship: an indentured labour demanding total emotional disclosure, an arrangement unimaginable between men. There are the sisters, vastly different, constantly at odds yet fiercely protective. More obliquely, and most affecting, the show investigates relationships of mothering warped by trauma. It’s a rich watch, in every sense.
Perhaps strangely for this job, I live in fear of people giving me TV recommendations. A chance conversation at a barbecue can feel like being handed between 20 and 160 hours of homework. But like Devon, this show goes down easy. Snappy comic writing, Hollywood pedigree and a corkscrewing mystery make it fantastically bingeable. And you know the best thing about it? It’s five episodes long. Now that’s music to my ears.
