According to rudimentary Googling, Apple has a generally well-regarded parental leave policy. But according to the results of Apple TV+, there is fear in the water in Cupertino (or in the company’s Los Angeles offices).
This Friday falls The changer is the second Apple TV+ series in five years that blends fairy tales and horror to address mothers’ and fathers’ concerns about nature, nurture and the price paid when parents are forced to abandon babies to return to work to go.
The changer
It comes down to
Thematically rich, dramatically confused.
Maybe not as downright effective as Servant, The changer is an admirably ambitious series, especially on a thematic level, where it seems to be bursting with commentary on parenting in the 21st century. But as storytelling, Kelly Marcel’s adaptation of Victor LaValle’s novel is a mess. While the series meanders through time and reality frames for good reason, the refusal to build any sort of momentum becomes increasingly frustrating. By the end of eight episodes, where the stakes barely go beyond the original premise and come nowhere close to being resolved, I noticed that The changer a dark slog – capable of sparks of inspiration, but generally marred by inconsistencies in the storytelling.
LaKeith Stanfield, who plays a single note with building intensity, stars as Apollo, a dealer of antiquarian books. Apollo is as serious about romance as he is uncovered first editions and finds love with Emma (Clark Backo). When Emma becomes pregnant, Apollo is determined to be a better father than his own father (Brian by Jared Abrahamson), who abandoned his Ugandan immigrant mother (Alexis Louder and then Adina Porter). Or maybe not.
A bigger mystery ensues when Emma begins to wonder if their baby is their baby, a delusion that escalates when her too-short maternity leave ends. Emma becomes increasingly unnerved by text messages and photos suggesting she and Apollo are being watched. After seeking advice from a social media mom group, Emma does something really bad with their baby. Or maybe not?
Apollo believes himself to be the hero of this story and embarks on a journey to get to the heart of what Emma did and why. But is Apollo’s hero’s journey to answers or to the understanding that when it comes to babies and their mothers, there are always things that even the most devoted and well-meaning fathers can never understand? So who is actually the hero in it The changer? Well, it’s not always obvious.
The changer begins, narrated by LaValle, with the words “Once upon a time,” but the actual DNA is much more complicated. There are traces of Greek mythology: “I am the god Apollo!” is the common mantra of Apollo, one of the show’s many recurring mantras – and African and Norse folklore, as well as urban history, pan-cultural fairy tales and more in this melting pot. If the American dream is that each generation will improve on their own parents’ example, then this is an American nightmare in which the perceived wisdom of the generations has been replaced by modern disconnection and dysfunction, further poisoned by the uncertainties of the knowledge gleaned from paranoid searching the internet. While traditional myths and fairy tales offered wisdom, usually meant to be clear enough for a child to understand, the cacophony of voices here – Instagram, wish-granting boyfriends and various people preaching a gospel of “destiny” and “destiny” – has equal power, but no clarity.
The first four episodes are especially repetitive as they hover in and around The Very Bad Thing that Emmy does, Apollo’s response to it, and what his mission is supposed to be. It’s maybe 10 minutes of plot, spread over four hours and fleshed out with maybe 10 minutes of flashbacks related to Very Bad Things that took place in the early stages of Apollo’s childhood and in his parents’ relationship. There’s nothing wrong with a subtext about the contagious effects of generational trauma, but it’s expertly handled in a few episodes, without Stanfield making his way through New York City (joined occasionally by Malcolm Barrett as fellow bookseller and military man) . veterinarian with his own barely introduced trauma). The arrival of Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring as a mysterious man who knows more than he says does at least push the show forward, but in very similar and unrelentingly miserable ways that require viewers to have a high threshold for drama that a baby jeopardizes. .
In the fifth and six episodes, progress is actually made and you see that the fairytale structure of the story is starting to take shape. There are welcome guest appearances from a very funny Steve Zissis – in a show in dire need of more humor and quirkiness – as a resident of the New York City underground and Jane Kaczmarek as a woman with some answers. Then comes the seventh episode and epitomizes everything I respected and was exhausted about in the series.
Directed by Michael Francis Williams, the seventh installment of The changer is hands down one of the most daring hours of TV you’ll see this year, if you get this far into the series. It’s a time-consuming one-woman showcase for the generally exceptional Porter (with Louder providing some support) set in a vintage Manhattan pay-by-the-hour hotel that ravages the Ugandan genocide, the AIDS epidemic and Lena Horne’s cover of “Stormy Weather” in a proudly theatrical – Brechtian? Yes, Brechtian – mixed bag.
It also lays out and lays out everything in the series up to that point, revealing the layering I didn’t know I needed to be curious about, with thematic spoon-feeding I didn’t need. In a vacuum, it’s a brave piece of television. In context, it’s a curious brick wall the show hits before a finale that, despite being all plot and only 30 minutes in length, never returns the series to the gear that seemed equally promising.
For all the variation in the story’s influences, there isn’t enough variety in the tone, and my investment was no longer in the characters or their circumstances; Instead, I just remained curious what points the show would try to make next.
The lack of tonal variation hampers all performances, especially Stanfield’s, whose sad, muffled tiredness becomes contagious. At least Backo, as sympathetic as Rosie Letterkenny, has a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ to play out – pre-partum and post-partum, I think – but not much internally. Backo is underused, as are Barrett and Amirah Vann, who play Emma’s sister. Some of the outsized supporting artists, such as Zissis and Kaczmarek, fit into a genre where our protagonists meet colorful characters on their unlikely path. Others, like Abrahamson doing 1950s-style Method emoting, don’t fit in very well. It’s hard to say exactly what Haring does, but it’s unpredictable anyway.
Predictability has been a by-product of centuries of purging fairy tales and mythology, training viewers to expect “happily ever after.” Maybe The changer works because it cheats these expectations and leaves viewers with something disturbing. Or maybe it’s just troubling because, for all the admirable and valuable ideas it deals with, nothing actually comes together. For a full season I tend to be in the latter direction and my interest in a second is very limited.
