Ryan Murphy’s Netflix agreement has exposed how many themes intrigue him — and how rigidly defined his past methods of addressing them have been.
Has he progressed beyond the franchises he began on FX? Consider his latest best-seller, “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”; the title’s overuse of commas implies a suppressed desire to call it what it is: another version of the true-life “American Crime Story” in everything except name.
“Halston’s” gilded portrayal of recent-ish celebrity culture reminded me of “Feud,” with the designer and his ego as the rivals.
Murphy has now reverse-engineered an “American Horror Event” with his new series “The Watcher,” taking a genuine event and finding some Murder House overdramatization inside or beyond its subtlety.
“The Watcher,” adapted from Reeves Wiedeman’s 2018 New York magazine story, follows Dean and Nora Brannock (Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts, with two children played by Isabel Gravitt and Luke David Blumm), whose heavily leveraged purchase of a dream home in a New Jersey hamlet is quickly complicated by the presence of evil.
The neighbors (played by Mia Farrow, Richard Kind, and Margo Martindale, among others) take an immediate disliking to the Brannocks, making each of them the initial suspects as the writer of spooky poison-pen letters from an anonymous “watcher,” attempting to terrify the family into moving away.
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Wiedeman’s novel is a nightmare designed for the era of Zillow; the real-life family at its core (the Broadduses, not the Brannocks) lives in a purgatory of mistrust, unable to trust the motives of neighbors who appear kind or odd. The folks the Brannocks encounter here frequently open from a position of outré antagonism, ironing out much of the magazine story’s insight into how suburban fury cloaks itself in civility.
There are story twists — deaths and revivals — in Murphy’s trademark style, with the specter of the supernatural appearing to rise and fade. After a while, the notion that everything is conceivable becomes synonymous with nothing surprising us, which is a poor thing for a program that has at least a toe in earthbound, every-homeowner’s-nightmare drama. The grandiosity of the Murphy technique collides with the story’s intriguing parts. To wit: the couple at the heart of the story, as written, is somewhat egotistical and thoughtless in their desire for a home beyond their means. Their unwillingness to leave a haunted house or a house plagued by human wickedness is colored by the reality that they can hardly afford to stay, let alone sell at a loss.
Murphy recounted a narrative about a mansion whose occupants battled down weirdos and maniacs dispatched as tormentors in the first season of “American Horror Story”; why bother taking a story that thrums with understandable tension simply to replicate that storyline again?
The cast performs a fantastic job. Naomi Watts has been asked to perform more fascinating work in the genre in films such as “The Ring” and “Funny Games,” but she is great here, despite being underwritten (her career as an artist is underexplored, while marital tension she feels is more gestured at than shown).
Cannavale is superb when his character’s developing madness over what his family is going through is allowed room to breathe.
Jennifer Coolidge, who played the realtor who sold the Brannocks their property, and Noma Dumezweni, who played a detective who assisted them, stand out as characters with tremendous complexity and dimension. Most of the other characters on the program eventually appear to be as flat and two-dimensional as the board on which Dean keeps track of his inquiry.
It’s been an odd time for Murphy, whose perhaps fading Netflix partnership just brought disastrous fruit. His clumsily named series on the life of Jeffrey Dahmer is an unmistakable zeitgeist smash, despite harsh criticism for its gratuitous brutality and blithe portrayal of real-world killings.
He takes a different path here, not dwelling on the agony of what one family went through, but utilizing it as a starting point for a rather funny, snappy whodunit.
By the time we reach a coda demonstrating Dean and Nora’s trauma and dislocation, it’s almost difficult to know how to take it: Their world has so little gravity that it’s difficult to understand, based on the oddity and randomness we’ve seen up until the show’s ending, why these characters in an unrelatable, ultimately unremarkable fiction didn’t just bounce back.
On Thursday, October 13, “The Watcher” debuted on Netflix.
