With the percentage of yearly TV debuts going up sharply over the last decade, one might have expected a similarly explosive rise in the number of inarguably unique, genre-bucking series. Unfortunately, that hasn’t really been the case, but then that just makes the arrival of Peacock’s Mrs. Davis all the more celebratory and laudable (especially by yours truly). A story that’s ostensibly about a nun’s search for the Holy Grail at the behest of a universally embraced A.I. app, Mrs. Davis easily stands out from the pack, even while splendidly emulating such iconic works as Indiana Jones and Looney Tunes. The show’s precisely that one-of-a-kind nature that was the biggest draw for star Jake McDorman when choosing his follow-up series to the Emmy-winning Dopesick.
CinemaBlend spoke with Jake McDorman ahead of Mrs. Davis’ premiere (available to stream with a Peacock subscription) about stepping into the bumbling-yet- confident lead role of Wiley. As Wiley, McDorman not only gets to rock one of 2023’s best TV mustaches, but he gets to be a legitimate action hero sprinkled with pathos and immature innocence. And when I asked if taking on this part allowed him to live out any Indiana Jones-geared fantasies, he responded positively, saying:
Everything. I mean, that was one of the most attractive, if not the most attractive thing, about just the pilot script when I got to read it for the first time, was that you really couldn't pin it down to one thing. It was an adventure quest movie like Indiana Jones, it had science fiction, it's got kind of a 'rom-com with your ex, but she's a nun,' all in a heightened reality similar to Watchmen. But there's drama with high stakes, there's kind of slapstick comedy, there's Looney Tunes-esque giant magnifying glasses. I mean, just the sheer originality of it was one of the most exciting and just refreshing - I don't think I realized how much I was hungry for something like that.
Anyone who has already watched Mrs. Davis knows that the show doesn’t take long at all to lay out just how bonkers and different a series it is. The first scene alone is a gobsmacker, with Monty Python levels of absurdly bloody violence, which also happens to be at the (no longer beating) heart of Betty Gilpin’s introduction as the quest-driven Simone. And from there, it only gets bigger, wilder and somehow more unpredictable with each episode.
Mrs. Davis was co-created by Tara Hernandez, who has genre-blending cred as a writer/producer on both The Big Bang Theory and its spinoff Young Sheldon, and Damon Lindelof. The latter helped bring to life such obsession-driven projects as Watchmen, for which Jake McDorman played proto-superhero Nelson Gardner in Ep. 6, and Lost, which he was okay with poking fun at in the H.A.T.C.H.-containing new series. Even with their combined successes, McDorman still wasn’t convinced that the pilot script he read would be one that got picked up. In his words:
So you read a script like that, and you're like, 'Wow, that'd be great. It's probably really expensive, and they'll never be able to do it.' So you kind of cross your fingers and be like, 'Let's take a big swing.' And as we started this, it was very apparent that Tara and Damon script have the same effect across every department. So like our set designers, and even our costumes and in our props department, like everybody really wanted to take the big swing that I think the script just necessitated, or would it just kind of fallen flat or fallen short. So walking onto those sets after kind of imagining it in your head, and then seeing it brought to life 10 times better than you even imagined, was fucking cool.
Not only did Hernandez and Damon’s script get picked up and ordered for a full season, but it sounds like McDorman was far from the only person on the set who was overcome with the abundant need to go above and beyond to make Mrs. Davis as good on screen as it was on the page. And I’m not alone in believing they pulled it off with room to spare, as it quickly became a critical darling after its release.
With three episodes left to go in Season 1, Mrs. Davis drops new and imaginative installments every Thursday on the streaming service, so be sure to watch. She really wants you to.
