Are you ready for some fun? Don’t you deserve it? I think we all do – life’s awful – so I gladly present to you Sirens, which isThe White Lotusmeets all the good series that Nicole Kidman has been in, with just a dash ofRyan Murphy-esque campto make it all go with an especially zingy swing! Welcome!
It is a tale of two sisters and a superrich villain whose cult-like lifestyle threatens to come between them. Older sister Devon (Meghann Fahy – yes, ofWhite Lotusfame, taking a much meatier part this time and running with it) is a semi-functioning alcoholic who is caring for their increasingly difficult father while working a minimum wage job at the local falafel joint and banging her married boss on the side. When she sends little sister Simone (House of the Dragon’s Milly Alcock and astonishing child actor inTim Minchin’s heartbreaking comedy Upright) a plea for help when their father is diagnosed with dementia, Simone responds by sending an edible arrangement (or fancy fruit basket, if you’re British). Devon duly sets off on the long journey to her sister’s new place of employ with the clear aim of ramming said fruit arrangement up her arse and asking questions later.
What she finds when she gets there, however, requires all fruit/arse-ramming plans to be put on hold and older-sister instincts to take over. Simone is the live-in PA to socialite and raptor conservationist Michaela Kell, played byJulianne Mooreat her best and most unsettling. Michaela – or Kiki, as Simone is delighted to be allowed to call her – is married to hedge fund billionaire Peter (Kevin Bacon) and has a tribe of acolytes; Devon immediately pegs her as a cult leader who has Simone in thrall. She starts a campaign to save her sister from Michaela, from her boyfriend (Peter’s flaky best friend Ethan, played by Glenn Howerton), from the lure of the lifestyle she is enjoying, and the even more gilded one she serves, and from forgetting who she is and where she came from.
All this while Devon must also deal with unwanted visits from her boss and dad, the staff that hate Simone for her high-handed ways, a local police force that is in Michaela’s pocket (which allows for a sterling repeated comic turn from Only Murders in the Building’s Catherine Cohen as Devon’s companion in the drunk tank), and maintain a new, fragile sobriety.
A plot unfurls that is wholly addictive, endlessly entertaining and utterly preposterous. But it is kept from spinning out of control (and from becoming mindless froth) by the sisters’ gradually revealed history and the deepening dynamics in their relationship, and their relationships with other characters, including Michaela and Peter. Until by about midway, you realise you may have been wrongfooted all along.
Without ever losing its wit or bounce, Sirens becomes a study in family, class and all sorts of other power struggles, the endless possibilities for good and ill that wealth brings, and the legacies of childhood trauma. It’s also pretty good on the price of sacrifice and how close you should stand to large windows when there are recently released falcons flying about, and to cliff edges when you are a male character in a miniseries named after a group of mythological women said to lure sailors to their doom. Though the name, too, is at least partly a misdirection.
By the end of its narratively and emotionally tight-packed five episodes – no streamer’s bloat here – Sirens has gained undoubted heft. You can see how and why it attracted actors of such high calibre. Adapted for the screen by Molly Smith Metzler from her own play Elemeno Pea, with Colin McKenna and Bekah Brunstetter, it fits the new form perfectly, but still has enough theatricality to allow most of the leads at least a minor monologue in which to flex their muscles and fly.
It is a rare bird in one more way, too. Its finale manages to satisfy what I suspect will rapidly become a very loyal audience, while leaving open the possibility of a second series – which, for the first time in a long time, I find myself hoping will be forthcoming. Let the good times roll.
Sirens is on Netflix now.