As an admirer of her work by Belle until Beyond the lights to the episode “San Junipero” of black mirrorlooking forward to finally reviewing a new one Gugu Mbatha-Raw television vehicle that doesn’t feel like a general waste of its undeniable charisma and dramatic depth.
It certainly didn’t happen on Apple TV+s The morning show, in which Mbatha-Raw was great despite an offensively endorsed character. It didn’t happen to Disney+s Loki, in which the acceptance was blatant, if not really offensive. It didn’t happen with HBO Max’s The girl in frontwhich offered Mbatha-Raw at least a substantive role, albeit one that stuck in a quilted and forgettable soapy thriller.
It comes down to
Not memorable.
Place Apple TV+s Surface much more in the latter category, so much so that it borders on an examination of how the superficial – or ‘surface’, if you will – attributes of a prosperous life can often be a ruse, a swindle, or a feint behind which an internal rot. It is, semi-ironicly, an overly superficial observation, one that requires narrative complexity to make musing worth while. It’s not here unfortunately. Surface ends in a bland meditation on reinvention and the way our personalities are shaped by our inescapable past and personal traumas, dignified thoughts told in a surprise-free frame that, again, completely wastes the thorough play and completely solid Mbatha-Raw.
Surface – destined to be confused by television critics and genre obsessives with the short-lived NBC alien manatee drama of the same name – stars Mbatha-Raw as Sophie, the wife of wealthy San Francisco venture capitalist James (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Sophie is still trying to get her life – marked by a posh house, a huge wardrobe and one gala after another – back on track, five months after authorities consider a suicide attempt in which she jumped off a ferry.
The problem: Sophie can’t remember jumping. In fact, she remembers almost nothing about her past, and when a mysterious man (Stephan James’ Thomas Baden) confronts her and says he’s a detective and the things she’s been told about her incident can’t be trusted, a research. Is James who he says he is? Is Baden who he says he is? Is Sophie’s supposed best friend, Caroline (Ari Graynor), who she says she is? Heck, is Sophie who she thinks she is, and if she doesn’t remember who she was, is she still that person (or anyone) anymore? And while we’re dealing with fundamental nature versus parenting psychology – Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Sophie’s psychiatrist – which aspects of your personality and behavior are determined by past actions and which parts of your identity are intrinsic or primary?
For the first two hours of this eight-episode drama, I was cautiously optimistic that creator Veronica West (Very trustworthy) had secretly given Garry Marshall’s overboard the Bel Air Treatment: Taking a title and premise that people love because it seems silly and frothy and saying, “If you take it seriously, you’ll realize this is a story of disturbingly perverse abuse and manipulation that the public has been misled into thinking of as to treat romantically. Sad spoiler alert: it’s not.
Really, Surface isn’t even as twisty and complicated as The girl in frontone of many recent limited series that I thought would have been a low budget erotic thriller set in a different media era, inevitably based on a potboiler read on the beach. Surface is an original story without anything hugely original. It’s not that it’s exactly derived, just very little happens here. It’s eight o’clock when character X tells Sophie “Don’t trust character Y” and Sophie becomes suspicious for a moment before realizing that character X is actually the shady one, only to realize that character Y is also shady, thrown into a salad spinner with a light dressing of very, very questionable self-help mumbo-jumbo that even the show doesn’t find convincing in the least.
At various points in those early episodes, Sophie experiments with different alternative therapies — sensory deprivation, hypnosis, etc. — and then the show just lets that stuff go completely and determines that the only thing that really helps is jogging through Vancouver — like —San Francisco , something that happens at least twice per episode. There are aspects of Sophie’s journey to mental health that interface with Hulu’s gloom Nine Perfect Strangers (Nicole Kidman executive produced that, while Reese Witherspoon‘s Hello Sunshine is back Surface), only that mess of a show had well-being ideas that it wanted to critique and colorful supporting characters that kept things from getting boring. Surface has a plot and a general outline, but none of the details have been filled in with distinction.
The story is completely propelled by misinterpreted, half-wired conversations, flawed Googling, and Sophie’s general ineptitude as a self-exploring detective. The phrase “Wouldn’t it have been easier if…” occurs at least half a dozen times in my notes. The series has no stakes at all, except that if Sophie actually has amnesia and is really turned on by someone she thinks she loves, that’s pretty mean. No one bothered to think of a more complex reason why this generalized empathy for Sophie should then be turned into suspense or a real mystery, and as a result, I was never shocked by any of the fake-outs, nor curious about it. one of the revelations.
Mbatha-Raw keeps an eye on the series for much of its runtime, capturing Sophie’s ongoing vulnerability and hinting at a fierceness newly found as part of her recovery or an innate part of the woman she used to be. The series has invested heavily in Sophie’s killer wardrobe and Mbatha-Raw plays dress-up with stylish confidence. However, she has been stranded by the series’ lack of compelling supporting characters or performances. The actors are either wasted (Jean-Baptiste), misplaced (Jackson-Cohen), left without any personality traits (James), or left without opportunities to play out their strengths (Graynor, my favorite piece of the ensemble nonetheless). Perhaps some viewers will embrace the possible love triangle or the setup in which one-dimensional figures do bad things, entangled in the rare film or television conspiracy that isn’t really grand at all.
Don’t expect anything conclusive at the end of eight hours. And if you’re like me, don’t expect the finale to introduce anything that makes you worry about a possible second season. I’m not advocating for TV shows to be cancelled, but I’m advocating for Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and the longer she’s stuck under the Surfacethe less likely she is to get the project she really deserves, a puzzle more confusing to Hollywood than anything else on this show.