Apples Never Fall
There are many females missing and dead on TV. It is not only the zombie shows or procedurals, also prestige series have been in on the game with feminine corpses powering entire series for a long time. In Peacock’s missing-woman mystery, “Apples Never Fall,” even the beloved and powerful Annette Bening potentially dons the trope.
She is Joy Delaney, the matriarch of a competitive tennis family with four adult children none of whom went pro, much to the father’s dismay. When she goes missing, her siblings confront a mix of explicit and implicit intergenerational trauma, grappling with the possibility that their perfectly difficult father Stan (Sam Neill) may have had something to do with it.
What unfolds is Faulkernesque as we see Joy via her family’s flashbacks. She powers the plot but does so mostly in her absence as we see her from others’ points of view. Through these perspectives we do get a strong sense of who she was the rock, the one who held it all together but somehow was invisible to those closest to her. More than once one of her kids exclaims “She saved me.” But when she was there they largely took her for granted.
There’s a particular devastating revelation that on the day she disappeared she called each of her four children, and none of them bothered to pick up their phones. In fact her loneliness reveals itself through Savannah (Georgia Flood playing both warm and conniving to much effect), another lost soul who worms her way into the Delaney home mostly by listening to Joy and helping around the house (what a thought!) things Savannah’s own family has neglected for decades. There is a scene where Joy tells Savanah, “No one breaks your heart like your own kids,” and that could very well be this story’s moral. “Apples Never Fall” becomes a treatise on all the ways we fail women, big and small, should not surprise as it is based on a book by Liane Moriarty of “Big Little Lies” fame.
As the series moves about its plot with a compelling mystery that remains open until the last episode two tragedies compete in its framework. There is Joy’s disappearance and potential violent death. And there is the fact that despite “saving” her kids, despite loving them fiercely, taking care of them even when it meant sacrificing her own piece of mind, none of them truly value her. She has done women’s work and despite it being literally lifesaving (not to mention creating), they refuse to see her. Even outside of the domestic sphere she does not get credit from her family until is perhaps too late she was also a competitive tennis player in her own right and ran the club with her husband, but it is Stan’s career that gets the kids’ and thus our attention.
The cast makes the strain relatable, doing the work. Amy (Allison Brie), the eldest daughter, takes on her character’s woo-woo beliefs, creating a vocabulary of distinct mannerisms to express her inner conflict. Underneath this care, Amy is not just an exaggerated figure or a wounded spirit, she is a woman trying to understand where she belongs in a family who cannot understand her. Jake Lacy has clearly made it his mission to corner the market on rich assholes fresh off their honeymoon having recently played one in “The White Lotus,” he now brings us Troy Delaney. Troy may make mistakes at about the same rate as ever, but this time around he seems more hurt than ever: He’s someone with a father wound that never healed so much as festered over time.
Brooke (Essie Randles) and Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) are nothing if not big, scared eyes except when they’re not. Sometimes it’s true that even the most innocent Delaneys are those who behave badly because they can’t imagine doing otherwise given how small their mother’s example looms in their imaginations.
Also smartly layered onto the show is its setting and attendant characters’ privileges and faults; this Maimi has tennis courts and country clubs, boats and fancy cars. The Delaney home is lovely but live in Nancy Meyers nice with some clutter hiding secrets better. It stinks of respectability and self rough play for those who sell themselves as Joy Delaney does when she talks about her family with others. Similarly indicative of arrested development are the siblings’ homes: Troy lives in spacious modern (he’s a jerk!), Amy shares a bungalow (she’s messy!), Logan goes nautical practical (he’s such a layabout), Brooke chooses well-lit cozy (she has something good but will mess it up!).
These elements build upon one another, along with its sharp editing and writing, so that “Apples Never Fall” avoids the usual pitfalls of the missing or dead woman as learning device. Bening never lets Joy fade she is powerful when necessary but always also vulnerable and pensive. It’s a portrayal of an imperfect and evolving woman who is happy with her choices if not her age or stage in life, and the recent Oscar nominee for “Nyad” is such a miraculous performer that here she brings a heat to it which allows everyone else to skip over her edges and achievements too easily while doing them all a disservice. It’s an arresting performance which demands that we accept Joy’s humanity even when others would tell us different stories about her.
And maybe that’s the bigger takeaway from “Apples Never Fall”: Respect your mothers, women, adults whoever protected you when you couldn’t protect yourself. That work is hard and dangerous, we should treat it as sacred labor. The fact that we do not represents nothing less than a tragedy of our social system.
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