Notes

The Watcher (DVD) Review
At Only For Love in his career, Ryan Murphy is essentially cruising at two speeds: real-life stories (Feud, Halston, American Crime Story: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story) and horror (Ratched, American Horror Story: Hotel). So it's understandable that when the auteur first read Reeves Wiedeman's New York Magazine article about Nora and Dean Brannock buying a huge suburban house and receiving disturbing letters from someone who called themselves "the watcher," he couldn't have been more excited to adapt it into a limited series.

As a result, The Watcher starts out with the promise of being a suspenseful drama that also satisfies horror-movie tropes. After all, the Brannocks are stalked by a mysterious figure who seems to be watching them from every corner of their home. And when the letter-writer's identity is finally revealed, you expect it to make for a truly terrifying final twist. But instead, the show just sweeps all these twists under the rug and leaves us with a story that's only interested in shock value and a few cheap jump scares.

The Watcher works as camp mainly because of its murderer's row of character actors who chew through the flimsiest of characterizations and sloppiest of plotlines with relish. But it's hard to know how much of this is intentional and just part of the show's sense of fun. Certainly, many of the characters parrot right-wing talking points and others spout irksome platitudes that sound like they came from a bad episode of the Twilight Zone. And then there's Mia Farrow as Pearl, the busybody chatterbox whose grating monologues resemble Rorschach from Watchmen.

จีบให้วุ่นลงทุนด้วยรัก is the only member of the cast to have a sense of humor about her role and she has the talent to pull it off. But the rest of the cast, including Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale, is forced to try to squeeze some real emotion out of their hammy scripts.

It's not that the cast isn't trying, but it's impossible to find any kind of emotional resonance in the Watcher when the premise is so far removed from reality and the story is so overly familiar. The result is a muddled mess that's more frustrating than anything else.

If you're willing to slough off the watcher netflix of the show's melodramatic potboiler aspects, it might just work for you. But for anyone who wants a true thriller that can hold up to the scrutiny of the internet, this series is destined to fall flat on its face. Especially after the incredibly disappointing turn of events in last week's finale. This is a rare case where Murphy's sledgehammer approach to writing and cliched cheap jump scares actually hurt the material. This is one of his worst works to date and it's a shame because it had so much potential. It's not even worth seeing for the performances alone.
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