Peacock’s Tepidly Twisty Apples Never Fall Is Nothing More Than a Bore

We’ve been a little spoiled by television mysteries lately. From the prestigious (True Detective: Night Country) to the soapy (Death and Other Details) to the case-of-the-week procedural (Wild Cards), there has been no shortage of smart and engaging examples of the genre so far this year. Unfortunately, Peacock’s latest mystery effort, Apples Never Fall, is not kin with those shows—in any way, shape, or form. 

Based on the novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty (author of other book-to-TV hits Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers), Apples Never Fall chronicles the disappearance of Joy Delaney (Annette Bening), a former tennis star-turned-coach and matriarch of the Delaney family. After selling their tennis academy and retiring, Joy and her husband Stan (Sam Neill) found themselves in a loop of fights and mundanity—that is, until a woman shows up on their doorstep one night, bleeding and helpless. Moved by her tale of domestic abuse and resilience in the face of danger, Joy welcomes Savannah (Georgia Flood) into their home, much to the chagrin of her four adult children, Troy (Jake Lacy), Amy (Alison Brie), Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner), and Brooke (Essie Randles). When Joy goes missing a few months later, the family questions both themselves and that mysterious stranger in their efforts to find her. Told over the course of multiple timelines, the Delaney family’s secrets come to light, with each member facing the fallout from their own hidden truths and missteps—all while the mysterious Savannah continues to haunt their memories. 

If that premise sounds engaging and interesting, that’s because it really should be, but the Peacock series fails to offer anything meaningful in its seven-episode runtime. It’s a missing persons story, a classic vanished-without-a-trace mystery, and yet it’s so unbelievably boring. From the kids’ petty and underdeveloped personal drama to the frustrating lack of urgency from both the story itself and the players within it, Apples Never Fall is about as thrilling and mysterious as watching paint dry. At every turn, it feels like no one is ever actually all that interested in bringing Joy home, with each episode finding both the kids and Stan moving at a snail’s pace in their half-hearted efforts to locate their mother and wife. For a show banking on messed up familial drama as its core selling point, each character in this series is simply unlikable but not sinister enough to actually be interesting; they’re just a family of mildly shitty people, and their ultimately tame secrets and lies do very little to justify pressing play on each episode (which are all named after and focus on each individual member of the family). 

The series’ insistence on cutting between its two separate timelines (indicated on-screen by titles of simply “then,” for the time Savannah was living with the Delaneys, and “now”) does nothing but undercut the shockingly bland reveals as they happen. The back and forth dissipates the tension and removes any of the urgency in both of these central mysteries, as the kids make little to no movement in both discovering the true identity of this mysterious woman who lived with their parents and the location of their mother. In the very first episode, as Troy, Amy, Logan, and Brooke slowly realize that Joy might actually be worth worrying about, they meander through every interaction in a way that continues to be the case throughout every single episode until the answers finally just fall into their laps in the home stretch. Both mysteries are half-baked at best, and there’s an unshakable sensation that neither is really water-tight enough to sustain much more than a single episode, let alone seven.