21 September 2024

Apples Never Fall is as sexy as a glass of barley water

Annette Bening and Sam Neill star in an American tennis soap that misses every shot.

Photo by BBC / Peacock TV / Jasin Boland

Some people like lupins, and some people favour a Love Island vibe with AstroTurf and a hot tub or pool. But in Apples Never Fall, the latest in a series of luxe American dramas to grace our small screens, the Delaney family have converted their entire back garden into a tennis court. You leave the kitchen – usually because you’ve been rowing with one of your ghastly relatives, and you need to re-centre yourself in the soft Florida air – and there it is, just three steps away, complete with an umpire’s chair and one of those machines that looks like a plastic drainpipe from which balls may be fired at regular intervals to the partner-less.

In a Nicole Kidman vehicle, this feature would be hidden behind a neat hedge beyond several miles of immaculate lawn. But in Apples Never Fall, in which Annette Bening fills the vaguely Kidman-shaped space, there’s no room for anything else; the court has fully swallowed the backyard, which must be a kind of metaphor, given that in this show, tennis is a tyrant to which the Delaneys must pay an emotional, physical or monetary tithe for the rest of their lives.

Thwack! There goes another family dinner, ruined by the memory of someone’s teenage backhand. Thwack, thwack! Here’s a tense tie-break, born of emerging secrets and lies. Basically, everyone keeps the score, forever – and no tin cups in sight.

But don’t get too excited. This isn’t Luca Guadagnino’s kinky epic Challengers; it’s as sexy as a glass of Robinsons Barley Water. Based on a novel by Liane Big Little Lies Moriarty, Apples Never Fall is set in Palm Beach, where Joy (Bening) and Stan Delaney (Sam Neill), have recently sold their tennis school. Big mistake. Life’s so boring when you can’t stand on the sidelines yelling at a protégé – and alas, not one of their four adult children is On The Tour.

Troy (Jake Lacy) is a venal venture capitalist; Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) scrapes barnacles off hulls at a local boatyard; Amy (Alison Brie) is a life coach with one too many chakras; and Brooke (Essie Randles) is a physical therapist whose business will go tits up unless every person within a five-mile radius tears their Achilles in the next half hour.

The plot flits between “now” and “then”. In the present, Joy is missing, and no one knows what has happened to her. In the past, we see the thick undergrowth of family life: its spiky brambles and poison ivy; the way it strangles full maturity, or even a little light personal development. Joy and Sam were not entirely happy together, but in the early days of their retirement, a cuckoo arrived at their nest, and hunkered down in expectation of fat worms. Her name was Savannah, and while the Delaney children were suspicious, Joy and Stan were suffused with such joy at her helpfulness, they began to get quite frisky (aching knee joints aside).

Savannah (Georgia Flood) is now in the frame for Joy’s disappearance, though after three episodes (all I could take in one go), we’ve yet to encounter Stan’s backstabbing, grand-slam-winning ex-pupil, Harry Haddad (Giles Matthey), and maybe he also has something to do with it. Was Joy, perhaps, the victim of a particularly fierce forehand?

What to make of this series, picked up by the BBC from the American streaming service Peacock, possibly because no one else fancied it? People mock the television of the Eighties: they’ve nothing good to say about Dynasty, let alone Howards’ Way (a BBC drama that was to the American soaps what Lidl is to Selfridges). But a lot of what we’re currently getting is no better than either of those shows – and in some respects, far worse. At least they were funny sometimes, even if only inadvertently.

Apples Never Fall isn’t a comedy (no laughs), nor is it a mystery (no suspense). It’s a soapy fandango that commits the great crime of making Sam Neill look like a bad actor and Alison Brie, of Mad Men, like a so-so one. As to what it has done to Bening, the star of American Beauty and The Grifters… oh, it’s more than a bit heartbreaking. The smile is as forced as the trousers are casual, and the feeling overall is of one of unconscionable waste.

Apples Never Fall
BBC One