Apples Never Fall

Apples Never Fall

TV has plenty of vanished and also lifeless women. It’s not merely zombie reveals or procedurals; the particular prestige series have always been in around the act with feminine corpses driving whole seasons. In Peacock’s missing-woman secret, “Apples Never Fall,” perhaps even the loved and powerful Annette Benning possibly dons this trope. She is the matriarch of a competitive tennis games family with four adult children, none of whom went pro much to their father Stan’s (a perfectly prickly Sam Neill) chagrin as Joy Delaney.

When she goes missing, her siblings face explicit intergenerational trauma and implicit (did their dad kill her?) but what they come up against are more than ghosts from Christmas past: They’re haunted by the possibility that someone may have done something terrible to someone else they love. What unfolds is Faulkernesque as we see Joy through her family’s flashbacks. She is the plot but mostly in absence; she becomes other characters’ point of view because she was with them. We do get a sense of who she was thanks to these perspectives the rock, the one who held it all together but somehow was invisible to those closest to her. “She saved me,” one of her kids says on more than one occasion. But they mostly took it for granted when she was there.

There is an especially devastating revelation that on the day she disappeared she called each of her four children, and none of them picked up their phones. In fact, we see how lonely she is in her attachment to Savanah (Georgia Flood playing both warm and conniving to great effect). Savannah is a lost soul who worms her way into Delaneys’ home mostly by listening to Joy and helping out around house (what a thought!) things that own family has not done for decades. There is a scene where Joy tells Savanah, “No one breaks your heart like your own kids,” and that may as well be the moral of this story.

“Apples Never Fall” is really a treatise on big and small ways we fail women, which shouldn’t come as a surprise since it’s based on Liane Moriarty’s book “Big Little Lies.” Two tragedies jockey in the series’ structure as it moves about its plot a compelling mystery that remains open until the last episode. There’s Joy’s disappearance and potential violent death she could be anywhere, from any Jane Doe to an active investigation.

And there is also the fact that none of these kids truly value her: Not one single child (she saved their lives!) in spite all them being loved so hard by her does anything for love or money. Even though it has literally been life-saving work (not to mention creative), they refuse seeing past womanhood; It’s too domestic for them. She doesn’t get credit until it might be too late even outside of home which should’ve been obvious when he married her but was such a surprise?! She had been competitive tennis player herself and ran club with him too! So why did Stan only care about his career?

The crew accomplishes this by making the tension relatable. Allison Brie, who plays the eldest daughter Amy, does a great job in bringing her character’s woo-woo beliefs to life through specific mannerisms that show she is wrestling with something inside herself. Thanks to how much thought she put into it, Amy never comes off as a caricature or just another wounded spirit; instead, she seems like any other person would who didn’t know where they belonged in the world after being raised by people so different from themselves.

We’ve seen Jake Lacy play the ever-petulant newlywed on “The White Lotus,” but now he’s cornering the market for rich assholes with Troy Delaney. His character makes plenty of mistakes too but this time around he seems more hurt than anything else like someone with a father wound that’s been festering for years and no clue how to go about healing it.

On the flip side, Brooke (Essie Randles) and Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) are basically all big scared eyes except when they’re not. Sometimes even the least likely-looking Delaneys are actually the ones lashing out because they can’t live up to their mother’s example as it looms so small in their minds.

Another thing that makes “Apples Never Fall” such an intelligent series is its use of setting to reflect characters’ privileges and faults alike; these people live in a Miami filled with tennis courts and country clubs, boats and fancy cars theirs is not Nancy Meyers nice (though lovely), theirs feels lived-in but cluttered (better to hide secrets).

The Joy Delaney type always wants things looking respectable while also harboring some rough-play sense of self where family is concerned; thus Troy resides within spacious modern digs indicative of his arrested development as both jerk and man-child while Amy shares a bungalow betraying nothing about her own mess but plenty about herself being one as such. Logan has chosen nautical practicality (he’s a lay about) while Brooke settles for well-lit coziness (she has a good thing going but is bound to mess it up!).

These pieces of the puzzle, combined with its sharp editing and script, build upon each other so that “Apples Never Fall” never becomes just another missing or dead woman as learning device story. Bening never allows Joy to fade away; she is fierce when necessary and open-eyed all the time.

In her we are shown a flawed woman who does things because she can if not always because they’re right for where she currently finds herself in life; this recent Oscar nominee for “Nyad” is such an incredible talent that here she exudes warmth others find too easy to overlook along with an edge that should damn them all but doesn’t. It’s a portrayal which arrests attention even when those telling it would rather pretend there was no humanity behind someone like Joy’s eyes.

And maybe that’s what really matters in “Apples Never Fall”: respecting mothers, women adults who shielded us back then from the world until we could do so ourselves; hard work which can be dangerous hence deserving highest regard as society’s flawed Achilles’ heel shows no appreciation thereof.

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