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.
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