If You Want a Mix of Mystery, Social Satire, and Wealth Porn, Boy Do We Have a New Show for You
Somebody still uses Edible Arrangements, and it's Michaela Kell, the witchy billionaire's wife played with swoony glee by Julianne Moore in Netflix's star-studded new five-episode limited series Sirens . The series kicks off with Meghann Fahy's Devon, a brash, hard-living Buffalo resident, coming home from a night in jail to find a comically large, bristling bouquet of melon and strawberries on toothpicks on her front step. Her baby sister Simone (Milly Alcock), who's now Michaela Kell's best friend, assistant, and sidekick, has sent Devon this fruit monstrosity in response to her urgent texts looking for help with their father's ongoing health crisis.
Devon's sudden, impulsive decision to take the damn thing back to Simone and throw it in her face brings her to the Kells' island home, and kicks off this delicious, spicy satire about social class. Adapted by Molly Smith Metzler from her 2011 play Elemeno Pea , and also starring Kevin Bacon as Michaela's friendly old-money husband, Peter, and Glenn Howerton as the Kells' wealthy, dissipated neighbor, Sirens offers ladder-climbers, fishes out of water, and a hilarious upstairs-downstairs dynamic, updated for our age of ostentatiously casual one-percenters who like to seem “normal,” but who still want what they want, when they want it.
Having arrived at the mansion the Kells call “Cliff House,” Devon, taking on the mantle of investigator, tries to understand whether Simone, who escaped their bad childhood to attend Yale and then passed up law school to take this job with Michaela, has been in some way bewitched by this gorgeous, demanding boss who lets Simone call her “Kiki.” Why has Simone stopped replying to Devon's calls and texts? Why does she now wear only the kinds of ugly, fancy pastel clothes you see in boutiques in the Hamptons, bearing keel-over price tags—the same styles every single guest and resident at Cliff House wears, without exception? Why does Simone keep this position, which has her drafting sexts from Kiki to Peter, misting lavender onto Kiki's underwear, sleeping in a bed with Kiki when the boss has a bad night, and accepting Kiki's limitations on her dating life? And has Simone had (Devon looks closer) a nose job?
Netflix has sold Sirens in its trailer as being about possible cult activity, and it feels at points like it might be shaping up into a beach-read thriller about mind control and murder. The fun lies in picking apart which things that happen in the Cliff House are truly abnormal, and which parts just look deeply weird to Devon, and to the other working-class visitors from Buffalo who end up on the island in the later episodes. Why would a lady like Michaela get so obsessed with raptor rehabilitation that she would hold a large, mandatory-attendance funeral for a bird? Are the women around Michaela, who adopt her manner of speaking, dressing, and moving, the subject of some strange scheme, or are they just swayed by the gravity of her money?
The cast of this farce, which is stacked with familiar movie and TV actors, is having the time of their lives. Fahy—who will be most familiar, to people who like to watch television about affluent fools, as the chipper, oft-cheated-upon housewife from the second season of The White Lotus —plays Devon as a smudged-eyeliner truth-teller whose acid observations about the Kells sink through to the bone. (“I have rich-people Tourette's,” she says at one point by way of a non-apology.) Alcock, who played young Rhaenyra Targaryen on the first season of House of the Dragon and will soon star in DC's Supergirl , has a youthful prettiness that telegraphs vulnerability (she's 25 yet could pass for half that), but when Simone gets vicious with the staff, you see the queenliness emerge from behind that mask. Kevin Bacon plays a great deceptively affable aristocrat who lets his wife orchestrate galas and handle decor while he reserves all the down-to-earth authenticity for himself. Julianne Moore's Michaela doles out cruelty and motherly concern in perfectly controlled alternating increments.
Sirens ' secret weapon, however, is a much less familiar face: Felix Solis, the actor who plays Jose, Peter Kell's head of staff, fixer, and security guy. Jose bridges the gap between the Kells and the rest of the world, and becomes an unlikely ally to Devon in her quest to infiltrate Cliff House. Solis has a nimble face, which he uses to humorous effect in responding to Michaela and Simone's demands, and Jose's kindness to the Buffalo visitors makes him a welcome on-screen presence—until, in the end, certain twists and turns of the plot throw Jose's intentions into sharper relief.
Sirens is named after both the shorthand that Devon and Simone use with one another to indicate distress and the mystical creatures who tempt sailors to their doom. The show, in just five episodes, packs in a lot of dualities: worship of nature and worship of the dollar, chill husband and uptight wife, poor sister and rich sister. “Of course they're bad people—look at their house,” a visiting magazine photographer says to Devon when she tries to sell him on the idea that he should investigate what the Kells are up to behind the scenes. Maybe, Sirens suggests, it's just that simple.
