We have gotten to the point where we’re not only seeing A-list movie actors making TV series, but now A-list directors have joined the party. Of course, when you have three Oscar winners participating in a project, expectations are pretty high. Can the combination of Alfonso Cuarón, Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline make a great TV series?
Opening Shot: A circle swipe opens up and we see the Italian countryside from a train. The camera pulls back to reveal two young people having sex in a sleeper compartment.
The Gist: The two are surprised by a conductor looking for tickets, but they don’t let that stop them from giving it another go. Then we see them disembark in Venice, and the man takes a selfie of the two of them with a film SLR.
We then switch to a ceremony where Christiane Amanpour presents an award to documentary filmmaker Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett), her proud husband Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) by her side. It seems that they lead a fabulous life as they share some red wine that Robert has carefully decanted into a carafe.
Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) has become extremely detached as a teacher as he approaches the half-century mark in the job. When a parent calls him in to complain about his comments on their child’s paper, he tunes out as the headmaster, Justin (Art Malik), tries to smooth things over.
He hasn’t been the same since his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) died nine years earlier; he finally gives away her clothes, but puts on her moth-eaten cardigan to keep her memory close. He then finds one of Nancy’s purses under a wardrobe; inside are photos that their son Jonathan (Louis Partridge) took in Italy with his girlfriend Sasha (Liv Hill). Suddenly, though, the subject of the prints changes to a blond woman (Leila George) in some provocative poses. This is the woman Stephen blames for Jonathan’s death. Nancy went into a steep emotional decline after Jonathan died, eventually spending all of his time in his old room, typing away on a typewriter.
Everything isn’t completely OK in Catherine’s world, it turns out. Her relationship with her and Robert’s 20-something son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is strained, especially in light of how close Nick and Robert are. Then a book shows up in her mail: The Perfect Stranger, by a writer named I.J. Preston. The dedication says, “To my son, Jonathan.”
When Catherine starts reading it, she recognizes who is being written about, to the point where she gets physically sick. She knows this is about her time with Jonathan. Robert, who knows all about this dalliance and has forgiven her, assures her that this is a work of fiction. But Catherine is surprised when Nick says he got the book and read it cover to cover, saying the woman who’s the main character got what she deserved in the end.
Stephen sits in Jonathan’s room and opens the locked drawer in the desk, finding Nancy’s manuscript, entitled The Perfect Stranger. He brings it to his old boss Justin as if it was his own writing; Justin, who has just been forced to retire, thinks it could be published. At the very least, Stephen can self-publish it and see if people are interested. That seems to appeal to Stephen, because he’s only really interested in a readership of one: Catherine Ravenscroft.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Despite the creativity applied by the show’s creator and director, Alfonso Cuarón, it’s pretty easy to group Disclaimer, adapted from Renee Knight’s novel, in with shows like The White Lotus, The Perfect Couple, and other shows where rich people’s perfect lives are barely hiding terrible secrets.
Our Take: Cuarón hops around during the first episode of Disclaimer, going from Catherine’s life to Stephen’s life, then uses circle wipes to signify going back in time to see Jonathan’s life before his untimely death. It’s very stylistic and indicative of how a top film director like Cuarón works with the expansive landscape of a TV series.
But take away the stylistic touches, like the circle wipes, the narration of Blanchett, Kline and others, and the hops back and forth in time and space, and you get a pretty well-worn story about wealth, class and secrets. It’s interesting inasmuch as the performances by Blanchett and Kline are up to their usual high standards, but there’s not much interesting about the story itself.
Cuarón tries to make Jonathan’s part of the story mysterious in the first episode, not even putting him in young Catherine’s universe until the very end. But it’s pretty apparent midway through the episode that a) Jonathan and Catherine will cross paths, and b) the pink-haired girl he’s with at first isn’t her.
From there, the question that distracted us was how far back the flashback to Jonathan’s Italy trip really goes. No one has smartphones, and Jonathan is taking selfies with an old film SLR (more on that in a minute), but no one has flip phones either. That would put us in the nineties, perhaps… until we realize that Catherine and Jonathan crossed paths when Nick was a boy. So, how far back are we really going? Is the “present day” not really the present day?
These are the kinds of things that we’re thinking about instead of the scenes in front of us, and that’s completely because Cuarón is trying to be clever with the storytelling. What we want to know are the nuts and bolts of the story: How Catherine and Jonathan got together, how toxic the relationship was, how Jonathan died and what Catherine has to do with it. We’re not expecting to get there in a straightforward manner, thanks to Cuarón, but what we hope is that as the story plays out, he’ll lay off the auteur-fueled trickery and just tell the story.
Sex and Skin: Well, the entire series starts with Jonathan and Sasha having sex on a train, so we’d expect to see more of that as the series goes forward.
Parting Shot: Through his viewfinder, Jonathan sees young Catherine on the beach, a halo of sunlight around his head.
Sleeper Star: Sacha Baron Cohen has the thankless role here as Robert, who seems to be supportive of Catherine no matter what. He seems to disappear so fully into his meek character (at least he’s meek at first), that we had to do a double take to confirm that it was actually Cohen.
Most Pilot-y Line: This might be the photography nerds in us coming out, but every time we saw Jonathan take a selfie with his SLR, we cringed. No one ever did that, and the zoom lens that was on the camera seemed to make an arm-length selfie impossible to actually accomplish.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Kline and Blanchett are compelling in their roles in Disclaimer, but we’re definitely worried that Cuarón is going to get too cute for his own good with the storytelling.
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.