As one of the characters tells us: “There are two sides to every story… someone is always lying.” This telly-isation of Alice Feeney’s source novel, created by a quartet of screenwriters and directed by William Oldroyd and Anja Marquardt, picks up that idea and runs with it energetically. It pitches us into a vision of an American rural south which is plagued with deceit, guilt, simmering resentment and murderous intent dating back decades. No-one is entirely innocent, and at least one person is incredibly guilty.
The plot orbits around a group of female classmates who grew up in the small town of Dahlonega, in Georgia. Fact fans will be thrilled to learn that it’s a real-life town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and was the site of a gold rush in 1828, but that needn’t concern us now. Anna, Rachel, Helen and Zoe all attended St Hilary’s private school, and though their adult lives have taken them in different directions, fate has decreed that they’re going to stay bound together by their shared past, and in particular one shocking moment from it.
In fact, one of them has already kicked the bucket at the start of episode one. Rachel’s body is found spreadeagled across the bonnet of a car left in the forest, having been stabbed 40 times. A further gruesome detail is that the perp has removed her fingernails.
Naturally this is a job for local detective Jack Harper (Jon Bernthal), who’s soon roping off the crime scene and fending off questions from the local media. He’s a little taken aback when Atlanta-based TV reporter Anna Andrews (Tessa Thompson) asks him if he knew the victim. The pointedness of this question is thrown into sharp relief when we learn that not only is Anna his estranged wife, but that he also knew the late Rachel intimately.
As the plot unravels over its six episodes, the assorted tangled relationships and various aspirations of the protagonists emerge. In her professional life, Anna is locked in a struggle for supremacy at the WSK TV network, where her chief rival for top news-anchor is the self-regarding blonde bombshell Lexi Jones (Rebecca Rittenhouse, pictured above with Mike Pniewski). Anna has recently returned to TV after a year-long absence, which we learn was because of the appalling death of her baby daughter Charlotte, and is now trying to persuade her boss Jim Pruss (Mike Pniewski) that she’s the gal who should be helming the news desk.
There’s plenty of twisty and titillating stuff here to keep the narrative simmering nicely, especially when Helen becomes a second murder victim, but you get the sneaking sensation that the mechanics of the plot sometimes militate against any subtlety in the characterisations. Still, Bernthal does a good job of depicting Harper’s edgy, hyperactive determination to assert himself in his police work in the midst of the chaos of his personal life, while Thompson’s portrayal of Anna manages to evoke the way she’s using burning ambition to blot out the pain of bereavement.
There’s some nice colourful stuff in the supporting roles, too. Chris Bauer delivers an epically sleazy turn as Clyde Duffie, the wealthy pizza chain tycoon who was married to the late and less-than-faithful Rachel. When confronted with a grotesquely compromising video of himself, he remains grumpily unfazed – “it’s auto-erotic asphyxiation, so what?”
Also treasurable is detective Priya Patel (Sunita Mani, pictured above with Bernthal). She’s Jack Harper’s underling, but her deductive skills and laser-like focus frequently knock him off balance. Less laudable is the show’s preposterous deus-ex-machina denouement, where the whole narrative gets flipped on its head by a plot intervention which is about as subtle as a charging rhino in a bathtub. There’s also a switched-identity reveal which demands not only a superhuman suspension of disbelief, but urgent investigation by the fraud squad. It’s a game of several halves, and they don’t all fit together.
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