We have come to learn one thing in our time as a television critic: Comedic actors can do drama with no problem, but that’s not necessarily true the other way around. So when we heard that Billy Crystal was going to star in a psychological thriller series for Apple TV+, we had no doubt that he’d handle the mostly-dramatic role well.
Opening Shot: A dank abandoned indoor pool. A man struggles to lift himself out of the pool, then drags his disabled foot to the diving board, gets on the board, and falls into the empty pool.
The Gist: This is when Eli (Billy Crystal) wakes up. He’s had nightmares like this ever since his wife Lynn (Judith Light) committed suicide. The trauma of finding her has been so powerful that he can’t even go into the bathroom where she bled out in the bathtub. He still sees visions of Lynn, who wonders why he has a photo of a simple log cabin on the fridge.
He hears scratching outside his door, and opens it to see an 8-year-old boy (Jacobi Jupe) scratching the paint on the front steps until his finger is bloody. The kid won’t talk, and he runs into traffic when he decides to go home.
Eli goes to a therapist (Julia Chan), but doesn’t really talk about how he feels about what happened. As a psychologist who helps at-risk children, Eli deals with the here and now; as he tells his friend Jackson (Robert Townsend), the idea of getting messages from the beyond doesn’t mesh with what he believes, which is that there is no afterlife.
The boy shows up at Eli’s house again, this time late at night. He decides to follow the kid back to where he lives, and finds out that his name is Noah and he lives with his foster mother Denise (Rosie Perez). Noah hasn’t spoken in quite awhile, and Denise is at her wit’s end trying to get some sort of answers about what’s been troubling him. We see from Noah’s perspective that he gets freaked out when he perceives water leaking into wherever he is, and attacks people when he sees the tentacles of imaginary sea creatures start to wrap around them. Noah draws a perfect rendition of Eli’s house.
Eli’s boss Gail (Sakina Jaffrey) gives him a particularly tough case, which turns out to be Noah. The first formal session the two of them have ends violently, with Noah speaking in a language that turns out to be an archaic version of Dutch. But that’s not all that’s strange about what’s happening with Noah, as Eli finds out after Noah is hospitalized after attacking a fellow student at his school.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? For some reason or another, we kept thinking of The Patient when we watched Before. Maybe it was because both starred actors more known for comedy, playing psychologists who are under some sort of duress.
Our Take: The one thing we didn’t have to worry about with Before, created by Sarah Thorp, is if Crystal could handle being in a psychological thriller. By now, we’ve come to realize that comedic actors can do drama much more easily than the other way around, and Crystal’s performance in the first episode balances the trauma he still can’t process with moments where he can be funnily aggrieved, like many of Crystal’s comedic characters have been. Those smile-worthy moments are fleeting, but they’re enough to keep the show from being a complete dirge.
Given that the episodes are all around the half-hour mark, Thorp doesn’t really have the time to do anything more than explore Eli’s trauma about Lynn and what link Noah has to it. The show isn’t a two-hander, but we suspect that most scenes are going to consist of Crystal trying to get through to Jupe’s character to communicate, as more and more info that connects to Eli’s past is revealed through Noah’s young perspective.
The show isn’t as creepy as it sets out to be, with ominous music substituting for actual creepiness, but perhaps as things progress a real creepiness will seep in. Crystal’s performance should be enough to keep what seems like a fast-moving series compelling, as long as Thorp doesn’t try to delve into other characters and stories.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Eli goes to Noah’s hospital room and sees a detailed drawing of the same log cabin he has a photo of at his house.
Sleeper Star: We’d like to know how Crystal persuaded Itzhak Perlman to play Drake, a friend of Eli’s that’s a linguist, who ended up sending Eli to a website that identified and translated what Noah said.
Most Pilot-y Line: Given the order the events in the episode happened, we wondered why Eli was surprised that the client his boss wanted him to see was Noah. It’s either a plot hole or poorly sequenced.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Billy Crystal’s lead performance in Before is what is the big attraction to the series, but we also hope that the episodes’ relatively-short runtimes will keep the storytelling focused on Eli finding out why Noah knows about his past.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.