In the marvelous "Mrs. Davis" (Peacock, premiering Thursday), Betty Gilpin plays Sister Simone, formerly called Lizzie, a member of an order of nuns based in a repurposed motel outside of Reno, Nevada.
She has a sideline in busting "wayward magicians" who use their knowledge to run scams, and we will learn, after a while, that she is herself the daughter of magicians: Monty (David Arquette), who performed, and Celeste (Elizabeth Marvel), who created his illusions. One might think for a minute we're about to see another secret-identity comic-book heroine at work, but what follows is far less usual. Indeed, what follows is — among many other things — a kind of critique of predictability.
Before we meet Simone, as she comes out of the night on horseback, we have already been to medieval Paris for a fight scene whose sanguinary excesses call to mind Monty Python, all the more so as its object is possession of the Holy Grail; and to a desert island, in the present day, where a shaggy castaway named Arthur Schrodinger (Ben Chaplin) — who has a cat — is putting the final touches on a skyrocket he hopes will attract rescue.
