A few years ago you could barely move for pulpy mysteries about privileged communities with skeletons in their closets, a trend set off by David E Kelly’s adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s hit novel Big Little Lies. But just when I thought the rich kid crime drama genre had had its day, another wave has arrived.
With another Nicole Kidman vehicle, The Perfect Couple, dominating the Netflix charts, and now the arrival of the equally star-stuffed Apples Never Fall on BBC iPlayer, it’s feeling like 2017 all over again. The latter drama, however, feels like a poor imitation – a trope-laden pastiche of an already soapy genre. It’ll sate anyone wanting their latest fix of waspy families and their scandalous secrets, but has little original to offer.
Apples Never Fall is also a Moriarty story – by no means her best loved and certainly her most clunkily titled. Led by Annette Bening and Sam Neill, the show claims Big Little Lies as an obvious point of reference, but with its hazy hues and elitist characters, it’s clearly trying to invoke The White Lotus too.
As the series greets us with a washed-out colour palette, palm trees and a wailing voice, it’s hard not to think of Mike White’s wealth satire about the highly strung guests at luxury resorts. In comparison with The White Lotus, however, the only comedy here comes from the clunkiness of the dialogue, and it’s not intentional.
We’re welcomed into the elite community of West Palm Beach in Florida, and the Delaney Tennis Academy. Matriarch Joy Delaney (Bening) cycles through town, passing by the showy mansions and deep blue pools before stopping to purchase an apple. The next moment, her bike is strewn on the road, its wheel still spinning. Joy is nowhere to be seen, but there’s blood on the ground – and apples too. Talk about on the nose.
The next day, Joy’s children, each with a perfectly all-American name – Amy (Alison Brie), Troy (Jake Lacy), Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) and Brooke (Essie Randles) – are sat at lunch, worrying about their mother, who has gone missing post-bike accident.
Their dialogue is thickly laden with exposition, as they admit that they’ve “all kind of been assholes lately” and hint that the kids don’t entirely trust their dad, Stan (Neill).
Also like The White Lotus – a series that starts with a murder before going back in time to the beginning of the week – the action then flashes backwards to an unspecified period before Joy went missing.
It’s the eve of her and Stan’s retirement from their popular kids’ tennis academy. The Delaney siblings smile in public, but behind closed doors their dinners are tense. Aggression is taken out on each other – and their curmudgeonly father – on the tennis court, as Stan prods his kids and tells them that they’re “going soft”.
Throughout the series, the drama ricochets between these two timelines. But with little visual differentiation between the two threads, it’s extremely hard to figure out whether the action we’re seeing is taking place in the past or present. There are twists and turns, sure, but they all feel exceptionally derivative and predictable.
The tropes come thick and fast, and with the exception of Bening, who somehow brings nuance to the flustered middle-aged mother archetype, the rest of the cast phone it in. We’ve seen Brie, Neill and Lacy play these roles before – Lacy in The White Lotus, of course.
The two relatively unknown actors playing the younger Delaney siblings, Turner and Randles, do a better job, but perhaps only because they haven’t made this exact series before. The arrival of Savannah (Georgia Flood), a mysterious woman who shows up at the parents’ door covered in blood, brings an interesting outsider into the fold. In the end, however, Savannah ends up being the most half-drawn character of the lot.
There’s little that stands out to me about Apples Never Fall which, I suspect, is sort of the point. This is a programme designed to fill the space left by Big Little Lies and the copycats that followed. Apples Never Fall didn’t have to reinvent the crime drama wheel to be watchable, but given its revered pedigree, I expected it to at least try.
‘Apples Never Fall’ is on BBC One tonight at 9.25pm. The full series is streaming on BBC iPlayer