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There are but a few authors who have their own universes within the modern television landscape. Agatha Christie, of course, gets a new adaptation every Christmas. There’s also David Nicholls and Kate Atkinson, or any number of thriller writers, from Gillian Flynn to the indefatigable Harlan Coben. But none have made quite the impression, in recent years, of Australian author Liane Moriarty, whose books have spawned a number of blockbuster sagas, the latest of which, Apples Never Fall, turns up this week on BBC One.
Joy Delaney (Annette Bening) has gone missing. She has recently retired from the tennis academy she ran with her volatile husband Stan (Sam Neill), and her disappearance sparks the concern of her children: anxious Amy (Alison Brie), macho Troy (Jake Lacy), disenchanted Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner), and unreliable Brooke (Essie Randles). Has somebody murdered their mother? And is that “somebody” their father, given that Joy may have been seeking a divorce? Or is Joy’s vanishing somehow linked to the sudden appearance, many months earlier, of a mysterious young woman, Savannah (Georgia Flood), who becomes a cuckoo in the Delaney nest?
If you know Moriarty’s work, you’ll know where this is going. Twists and turns, misdirection and obfuscation, not to mention lashings of family drama. This is the third big-budget adaptation of Moriarty’s work, beginning with 2017’s Big Little Lies, and followed up by Amazon’s Nine Perfect Strangers as the meat in this hammy sandwich. Though they are unified by A-list talent and high production values, the creative ambitions have been progressively stifled. Where Big Little Lies was shot with a vaguely artistic eye, Apples Never Fall is your run-of-the-mill sepia-infused thriller. Even the title is clunky, and the dialogue is often similarly stilted. “Everyone says they want a doctor in the family,” the sibylline Savannah observes. “But I think having someone in the geosciences around is way more interesting.”
All the same, how bad can a show with Annette Bening, Sam Neill and Alison Brie really be? And that is the key to Apples Never Fall. Each episode follows a different Delaney as they navigate both the family dynamics and the muckraking presence who will resurface long-buried secrets. They all glow in the south-Florida light (a relocation from the novel’s Australian setting, though the series is still filmed there), looking preternaturally beautiful. But that’s something that unifies the Moriartiverse: glamorous people, in glamorous settings, behaving slightly repulsively towards one another. And while no one is departing much from their established archetypes – Lacy is now the go-to Hollywood bro, while Brie has played every bug-eyed neurotic going – it all fits together neatly, like a puzzle.
“It kind of felt easy being a martyr,” Joy confesses, in flashback. “Maybe I let myself down.” And for all that Apples Never Fall delivers reliable tropes – the missing woman, the mysterious stranger, the rival from the past who’s back on the scene – its core concern is how a dysfunctional marriage begets a dysfunctional family. The script, from showrunner Melanie Marnich, is frequently heavy-handed, but there’s enough in the material to keep viewers’ interest for seven episodes. And while it doesn’t stick the landing in the same way as Big Little Lies, the rug-pull in the seventh chapter manages, in tennis terms, to be a comfortable put-away, even if it’s not quite a smash.
Apples Never Fall exists in the middle of a Venn diagram between full-blown murder mystery thrillerdom, and an almost soap operatic depiction of crumbling dynasties. It is an emerging portmanteau genre, designed to unite men and women, young and old, in something mildly exciting, mildly titillating and mildly relatable. The result is a show that lacks the crunch of a Pink Lady, but still has the mellow tones and summer flavourings of a Golden Delicious.
