Apple TV’s latest eight-parter (Surface) takes its cue from a classic subtype of the potboiler, whose lineage stretches from Rebecca, through Douglas Sirk’s lush, astute 1950s melodramas, all the way up to the proliferation of novels whose titles start with ‘The Girl…’ (and associated broad spoof). The latest iteration has a few tried and true ingredients: a privileged woman whose life has all the superficial trappings of success, including a beautiful home and marriage to a handsome, successful husband. Said husband is almost invariably a cheater, an abuser, a white-collar criminal, or even a murderer.
Surface, a mean girl
Pick your permutation of the above, throw in a suspicious best friend or sibling, and a resentful or bemused outsider (say a journalist, or another sharp, observant woman whose face doesn’t quite fit the mean-girl-mummy mold) and you’re all set to simmer.
Much like Sirk’s oeuvre: in the best of these, the violence is emotional rather than physical and more bruising for it: the gleaming, mirrored planes of beautiful rooms and calm domesticity deceive, symbolic of suppressed or stunted internal lives. By contrast, the less imaginative examples rely instead on an ever more unbelievable set of plot twists, featuring gorgeous people, their clothes, condos, and cars (see the increasingly repetitive Riviera).
In our era of increasing openness about our respective traumas, with no Hayes’ code tiptoeing necessary, Surface suggests that emotional peril and repression still make for strong drama. Among a coterie of well-off San Franciscans, Sophie (a poised and subtle Gugu Mbatha-Raw) recovers from an attempted suicide, with no recollection of what prompted her to try taking her own life.
Its tagline ‘what if you didn’t know your own secrets’ contains the potential to explore life with traumatic brain injury, or the universality of mental illness, even among the one percent. Or even the personal consequences of a Meta-verse of fractured privacy, in Sophie’s free-floating sense of self.
In the role of Sophie, there’s also the potential for a different take on the often moneyed, always mannered, and gaslit woman: typified by the tightly wound performances of Nicole Kidman. Apex Kidman may be found in psychological horrors like Birth, The Others, Before I Go To Sleep (adapted from a novel with a very similar premise to Surface), and of course, Big Little Lies.
Big Little Lies might be considered a modern potboiler exemplar: heavy on murder, dubious relationships, and sexual, racial, and class tensions. It’s unclear from the stylish trailers if Surface delves into such complications, though both shows share an executive producer in Reece Witherspoon (from her Hello Sunshine production company, which also helmed Apple TV’s The Morning Show), part of her stated ongoing commitment to telling female-centric stories onscreen without tokenism.
Still, if Surface can take the best of the genre and capitalize on the pooled talent of its ensemble cast (featuring established character actors such as Marianne Jean-Baptiste as well as the less well-known but genetically gifted, like Oliver Jackson-Cohen), it might be able to support its central conceit.
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