Apples Never Fall (now streaming on Peacock) has a lot of big stars in it, but just because it has a lot of great actors doesn’t mean it’s a great show. However, one of those great actors manages to keep the show from becoming yet another annoying “rich people being awful” story.
Opening Shot: A beach town full of huge houses and palm trees. A woman rides a bike past some of these houses; the bike has a “Delaney Tennis Academy” logo on it. She passes the Garces Tennis Academy, then shops for apples at a market. We then see the same bike in the middle of the road, with a bent wheel and blood on it. Apples are scattered about.
The Gist: The woman is Joy Delaney (Annette Bening); she and her husband Stan (Sam Neil) owned that tennis academy in West Palm Beach for decades before they decided to sell it and retire. We see their four adult children — venture capitalist Troy (Jake Lacy), “seeker” Amy (Alison Brie), physical therapist Brooke (Essie Randles) and surfer Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) — at a restaurant wondering just what’s going on with their mother. Amy hasn’t heard from Joy in at least a day, which is unlike her, especially since she retired. Troy thinks something is up, too, but Brooke and Logan think they’re overreacting.
We go back to Joy and Stan’s retirement party, where they all look like one big loving family, with the Delaneys being a pillar of the West Palm community. But the more we see their kids talk to each other about their mother not responding to them, the more evident it seems that things between Joy and Stan aren’t great. An unknown woman is mentioned, with Logan suggesting she’s not done inflicting damage on the family.
When the kids come by the house for brunch after Joy and Stan return from a retirement trip to Wimbledon, the tension between their parents is palpable. Stan seems to be especially grumpy, getting on Troy about his divorce and Amy about her aimlessness. Then, when they go out to play tennis, Stan, a former pro who had a fair amount of success, berates them when they make bad shots. When Troy gets on the court with Stan, the volley is so intense that Stan’s bad knee almost gives out.
Late one night, a woman named Savannah (Georgia Flood) knocks on Joy and Stan’s door; she’s got a cut on her head and claims that she jumped out of her boyfriend’s car when an argument they had started getting out of control. Savannah probes Joy about her family life, and they connect to the point where Joy invites her to stay overnight; Stan grumbles that they know nothing about Savannah and that she could be a “maniac” for all they know. But his stance softens the next morning when she makes French toast.
Logan is the first of the siblings to meet Savannah, and is naturally put off by the fact that this “weird woman” knows about him and his brother and sisters.
Back in the “now”, Joy is still missing after three days. Troy goes to the house and is surprised to see Stan there; he’s even more surprised that his dad has a cut on his face. According to Stan, the two of them had an argument, and Joy left to have some space. She hasn’t been in touch and he has no idea where she is. That’s when their housekeeper discovers Joy’s phone in a load of laundry.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Based on Liane Moriarty’s book of the same name (Moriarty is an executive producer, along with Bening; the writer and showrunner is Melanie Marnich), Apples Never Fall has the same semi-dreamy feeling as her other two adaptations, Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers.
Our Take: Apples Never Fall has a lot of the same tropes as other “rich people being awful” series, and those tropes have started to drive us up the wall after seeing them umpteen times over the past seven years, since Big Little Lies made its initial splash. In this case, the Delaneys aren’t exactly wealthy, especially by West Palm standards, but they did pretty well with their academy, even training a Grand Slam winner in Harry Haddad (Giles Matthey), whom we’ll discuss in a bit.
Still, those tropes that drive us nuts are there. The biggest one is the “nothing is as it seems” trope, where we see the happy, contented Stan and Joy, and then bits and pieces of that contentedness gets chipped away through some of the awful behavior we’re not shown at first. And then there are the adult Delaney children; two of them — Amy and Troy — are characterized by their flaws and little else, and the other two — Logan and Brooke — are more or less blank slates. The presence of Savannah immediately raises red flags that we’re pretty sure will be teased out throughout the season’s seven episodes. And we’re not in love with the “now” and “then” timeline jumps. We sighed and rolled our eyes more than once during the first episode.
And yet… Bening’s performance as the seemingly-doomed Joy is the glue that binds all of these annoying tropes together into a narrative that is compelling to watch. We can see behind her smiling, “everything is great!” exterior a roiling loneliness that has been bubbling up for years, long before the Delaneys sold the academy and retired. You can see it when she talks to Savannah about how tough it’s been to figure out what to do when you don’t have the grind of work to worry about, and you don’t spend as much time with your adult kids as you thought you might. It’s likely the reason why she’s so open to having Savannah around the house, despite the fact that she doesn’t know anything about her.
We want to know what happened to Joy, and who did it, mainly because we’re actually rooting for her by the end of that first episode. While everyone around her seems to be overprivileged and/or cartoonish in personality, Joy seems to be authentically searching for that next chapter in life and to be as contented on the inside as she looks on the outside. Her flashes of indifference to Stan when they’re in private show that whatever ends up going on that leads to her disappearance isn’t the first time that he’s been cruel to her, and likely won’t be the last. And the fact that their adult children somehow never see that tension, only concentrating on how their relationship with their father affected their lives, speaks to how well Joy has been able to keep things together for so long.
As we go along, jumping back and forth between the undefined time before Joy’s disappearance and the investigation after it, we hope we get to know more about Troy, Amy, Brooke and Logan. We know that Brooke is in a relationship her girlfriend Gina (Paula Andrea Placido) that may not last, and that Troy’s new relationship with Lucia (Katerina Lenk) has a lot of complications. Harry Haddad and his return to competitive tennis has to factor in here somehow. And, for the love of the TV gods, we hope that Alison Brie’s flibbertigibbetness is explained, because she deserves so much more than playing an aimless 40-year-old that still has to live with roommates.
Sex and Skin: Lucia and Troy are shown in a postcoital scene, with Lucia somehow still wearing her bra.
Parting Shot: The bloody, mangled bike is loaded into the bed of a pickup truck and is driven away. Is Savannah in the driver’s seat?
Sleeper Star: Paula Andrea Placido’s Gina is that understanding SO that has to deal with being on the outside looking in as someone they love gets dragged into the muck by their toxic family dynamic, which is why we hope we see more of her and her character gets more to do than just being supportive.
Most Pilot-y Line: Savannah is so eager to find out from Joy what her kids’ names and professions are, we were surprised she didn’t ask for their Social Security numbers, too. The scene is either expositional or a way to set up that Savannah is a con artist. Either way, it’s clumsily done.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The only thing that keeps Apples Never Fall from being yet another eye-rolling show about wealthy people being terrible is Annette Bening’s performance as a woman who is still looking for something, even in retirement.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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