Apple TV+’s new series damn near cost me my marriage: Calls reviewed

Calls is the very antithesis of televisual soma. In fact it’s so jarring and discomfiting and horrible that I think this week’s column damn near cost me my marriage. ‘Why are we having to watch this hideous drivel?’ grumbled the Fawn, who felt cheated of a soothing night glued to our new addiction, the French series Call My Agent! (Netflix). ‘Because it’s my job and this is a new thing and Call My Agent! isn’t,’ I said.

So I had to watch on my own. I do understand the Fawn’s objections. Really, it’s more like radio than TV and might work better enlivening a long car journey. There are no attractive images to look at — no actors or scenery or anything like that — just random electronic squiggles and snatches of text, spelling out the muffled, often hard-to-decipher phone conversations being played out before you.

In episode one, a man in LA is talking to his ex-girlfriend in New York when a mysterious creature (not human, she thinks) looms outside her window and, by the time the cops get to her, has all but torn her to shreds. Meanwhile, the man has sex with a woman in his bed who he thinks is his new partner — but then is disturbed to get a call from his actual new partner (who clearly isn’t the mystery person in his bed), who then screams that her baby has been taken. It gets even weirder after that.

The next episode was more comprehensible and more disturbing. A feckless, fairweather boyfriend has driven out into the desert in a fit of pique because his girlfriend has just told him she’s pregnant and he can’t cope. But when they speak on the phone there is a clear temporal mismatch: he thinks he has been gone for a few hours, whereas she thinks he has been missing for days.

With each conversation — the best friend with whom he was hoping to shack up for a few days, his worried mom, his now clearly sick mom five years later on the verge of death, his now grown-up son — time accelerates even as our main guy remains stuck in the same day.