This post contains spoilers for the limited series Sirens, now streaming on Netflix.
Maybe I should have known that Sirens was going to be confusing when its main character licked a stranger’s neck.
The licking happens late in the first of five episodes, created by Molly Smith Metzler, based on her play Elemeno Pea. Our heroine is Devon (Meghann Fahy), a hot mess from Buffalo who has arrived on a rich and insular Martha’s Vineyard-eque island in search of her younger sister Simone (Milly Alcock). Devon is in desperate need of help to care for their senile father Bruce (Bill Camp). Simone, meanwhile, is personal assistant to Michaela “Kiki” Kell (Julianne Moore), the aloof second wife to wealthy businessman Peter (Kevin Bacon), and has no interest in Buffalo, Bruce, or anything that doesn’t involve basking in the reflected glow of her rich and glamorous employer. After Devon makes a big scene, Kiki offers her a $10,000 payoff to leave the island and never return, and sends her away in the care of her chief of staff, Jose (Felix Solis), who drives Devon to a local inn to spend the night ahead of the morning ferry.
And as Jose is dropping Devo off at the inn, she licks him.
She apologizes quickly, explaining, “It’s a thing I do.” She says she’s working on the problem with her text therapist — she can’t afford traditional therapy. Jose shrugs, pleads with her to not lick anyone at the inn, and leaves.
In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with the licking scene. It’s strange. It’s surprising. It’s a nice bit of awkward comedy for Fahy — whose star has been on the rise since her turn as the surprisingly complex trophy wife in the second season of The White Lotus — and it fits into the quirky vibe that Metzler and director Nicole Kassell have established throughout the premiere. It also seems to be setting up a payoff later, whether it’s Devon talking more about how this particular tic developed, or her licking someone else at the worst (or best) possible moment.
But the licking is essentially forgotten after that, other than Jose affectionately calling her “neck licker” in a later episode. Instead, it becomes one oddball incident in a show that’s full of them while also trying to make you take the relationship between the sisters and their neglectful father seriously, and that can’t decide what it wants the great Julianne Moore to play.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
White Lotus has led to a cottage industry of shows involving rich, eccentric people getting into various hijinks in beautiful, ominous locales. Often, they feature Nicole Kidman (whose Nine Perfect Strangers returned to Hulu for a second season this week), and/or Fahy. (The two of them teamed up for Netflix’s The Perfect Couple.) And they’re generally aiming for the same blending of tones — satire, but with genuine emotions lurking just underneath the humor — that White Lotus creator Mike White has attempted with varying degrees of success.
Few things in TV are more satisfying than when a show tries to cover multiple vibes and genres at once — It’s a mystery! And a sitcom! And a soap opera! And a trenchant commentary on the Way We Live Now! — and succeeds. But when it doesn’t work — and boy, does it not work for Sirens — few things lead to more head-scratching for viewers.
There are at least a half-dozen different shows elbowing one another for dominance in Sirens. Some of them seem genuinely appealing. Fahy is a lot of fun playing against recent type as a blue-collar woman who has zero interest in the glamorous, opulent world that so fascinates her sister. There’s a brief period where it seems as if Sirens will involve Devon going undercover to expose the truth about the cult that she believes has Simone in its thrall. But that idea gets scrapped not long after it’s introduced. During that brief story window, there’s a scene where Kiki’s three interchangeable sidekicks are all lip syncing to “WAP,” and it’s unclear whether Devon is hallucinating this, or they’re really doing it. It’s less that the show’s reality is elastic than that it’s muddled.
Mostly, though, this impressive cast is asked to play multiple, at times incompatible, versions of the same character. At times, Bruce — who eventually winds up on the island in the care of Ray (Josh Segarra from The Other Two and Abbott Elementary), Devon’s married boss and sometime-lover — is a figure of pure awkward comedy; at others, he is a figure of genuine nightmare, and the reason Simone has so enthusiastically turned herself into a Stepford Assistant whose entire personality is modeled on Kiki’s. Similarly, Kiki vacillates between a broad figure of oblivious privilege, not that far removed from Moore’s The Big Lebowski heiress, and a scrapper who feels just as insecure in this place as either sister. Glenn Howerton from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia plays next-door neighbor Ethan, an idle rich man-child having a secret affair with Simone. He seems to mostly be a joke, but then we’re meant to be somewhat sympathetic when Simone rejects his marriage proposal; then he becomes ridiculous again when he falls off the cliff on the edge of Kiki and Peter’s property, and escapes with only a few broken bones.
All of this builds to one of the more unintentionally silly conclusions to a story like this in recent memory. Earlier in the story, Peter — increasingly unhappy with Kiki’s controlling personality, and going through at least his second midlife crisis — kisses a shocked Simone during a private moment. A Vanity Fair photographer, in town for the weekend to shoot Kiki’s exclusive annual summer gala, catches the kiss on camera, and sells the photo to Kiki, who fires Simone and ponders using this evidence of infidelity to nullify her restrictive prenup. But Simone warns Peter. Peter has Jose steal the only copy of the photo(*) from Kiki’s safe, and tells Kiki that he’s trading her in for a newer model: Simone. And in the middle of the gala — a gala that, mind you, Kiki made a big show of kicking off for all the guests only minutes before — Kiki is sent packing, and Peter swans around the party with Simone on his arm. None of the guests seem to even notice the swap in partners, much less seem concerned by it.
(*) Never mind that this story takes place in the present, and thus Kiki could always go back to the photographer for another one.
Maybe if Metzler and company had leaned all the way into the most arch version of the story, the strangely seamless transition would feel fitting as its final joke: Simone, like Kiki before her, sliding into a life that will never really be hers, where she’ll eventually be replaced with a similar ease. But because Sirens keeps toggling between cartoon logic and a more sincere approach, the twist plays as nonsensical. Devon leaves the island with Bruce in tow, lamenting the fact that she’s completely lost her sister, and discovers Kiki riding the same ferry, the two of them essentially at the same social station now. For a few minutes, Kiki is written, and played, as a human being. But a three-dimensional person has no place in a show that could have the mid-gala switcheroo take place moments earlier.
I’ll give Sirens this: It may be a failure, but it’s an interesting one. Most of the shows in this corner of the streaming economy seem content to stick to a basic formula. Metzler’s out here trying a whole lot of things. They don’t fit together, yet the experiment at least leaves an impression. Like Devon licking Jose, there’s no good explanation, but you’ll remember experiencing it.
From Rolling Stone US
