You had a narrow escape this week. I was about to urge you to watch Sirens, the latest iteration of that fashionable genre Ultra-Rich Lifestyle Porn, currently trending on Netflix. But luckily for you I watched it right to the end and got to witness the whole edifice collapsing like a speeded up version of Miss Havisham’s wedding cake.
Normally, this doesn’t happen. Like most critics I have neither the time nor the work ethic to view a TV series in its entirety before putting in my tuppenny-ha’penny’s worth. I just assume that if something starts well or badly it’s going to continue that way. Not Sirens, though. It’s as if, about halfway through, a promising set up with a cast of well-drawn characters, a luscious location and an enticing plot line suddenly got hijacked by a madman with an axe screaming: ‘Must destroy!’
Since Sirens began life as a stage play (Elemeno Pea), since it was adapted for TV by its creator, and since most of its problems are tonal and structural, I think we can safely lay much of the blame at the door of the author, Molly Smith Metzler.
Her play does not seem to have had much impact, at least not on the stage, since it came out in 2011 as part of the ‘35th anniversary of the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky’. By the end of the TV adaptation you might well be able to guess why. Frothy, satirical and witty, it starts out as farce; then mutates, unexpectedly and almost deftly, into a haunting potential murder mystery in the manner of Rebecca; then, suddenly, decides to do what I can only describe as ‘totally lose its shit’ and metastasise into a psychologically implausible, grotesquely cringey, excruciatingly unsatisfying melodrama.
Sorry to stick the knife in so brutally. But why didn’t someone intervene earlier to spare the viewer this pain? Why didn’t one of the high-powered, A-list cast members – Julianne Moore, Kevin Bacon, that blonde girl from The House of the Dragon, that one who was in series two of White Lotus – not intervene and say: ‘Look, I’m up for this in principle. But seriously. Can we do something about this dog’s breakfast of a plot?’
Anyway, the set up is this. There are two sisters from Buffalo, New York (quite rough, apparently), one of whom, Devon (Meghann Fahy), has drawn the short straw of having to care for their alcoholic father at their slummy apartment, while the other, Simone (Milly Alcock), has landed a dream job working for Michaela, aka Kiki, the wife of Peter, a generationally uber-rich hedge funder, on their enormous cliff-top estate on the fictional, Hamptons-ish island of Port Haven.
Despite her traumatic past (drunk, abusive father; suicided mother; stints in care; on heavy meds), Simone turns out to be amazingly good at her job as PA and boon companion to Michaela (Julianne Moore). Her scholarship to Yale has enabled her to pass so convincingly for preppy that she has managed to win the heart of Peter’s amiably rich and useless friend Ethan (Glenn Howerton), who actually wants to marry her.
Enter big sister Devon, who is so incensed by the obscenely massive fruit bouquet Simone has sent in response to a plea for help caring for Dad that she decides to carry the offending item all the way to Port Haven for a sisterly confrontation. Devon, being a no-nonsense, working-class girl who hasn’t lost touch with her roots – you can tell by the fact that she administers fellatio to one of the crew on the ferry journey out, before bedding several other staff members on the estate – is unimpressed. She thinks that Simone has been sucked into some kind of weird upper-class cult.
This is the stage – the first two episodes – when Sirens works as a delightful satire on the lives of the Nantucket gilderati, with their billion-dollar gala dinners for injured raptors, their impossible pastel-coloured outfits, their ludicrous mansions and their oppressed staff (forbidden not just from smoking but from any form of carbs). Moore is mesmerising as the creepy, passive-aggressive second wife. There are nicely observed details – like the chef who looks exactly like a private chef would, continually having her specially-prepared-for-the-day smoothie rejected by Moore. ‘Of course they’re bad people. Look at their house,’ someone observes.
Then it goes pear-shaped. First, the tone and mood changes, from flippant and playful to overwrought, heavy-duty therapy. Second, all the characters suddenly start to behave like malfunctioning robots. Simone, who we’ve more or less liked, for all her flaws, turns into a monstrous, heartless bitch. The Dad goes from lucid and debonair to deranged and back again at the flip of a switch. We don’t know where we are. Neither, clearly does the author. Quite a few critics, surprisingly, have raved about it. But the viewer ratings have been dismal and the viewers are right.
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