What the Show of the Summer Knows About Intimacy

Yahoo

24-05-2025

The beach-read vibes are strong with Sirens, a Netflix miniseries set on a moneyed northeastern island compound that, at first glance, seems awfully familiar. The hydrangeas bloom with manicured abandon. The dramatic tension is stoked with top-shelf liquor and minor acts of class warfare. Absolutely everyone has secrets. The enigmatic trophy wife at the center, Michaela, is played not by Nicole Kidman—as is, at this point, stylistic tradition—but by Julianne Moore, effusing lavender mist and toxic insecurity. Michaela is planning an end-of-summer gala, assisted by her sharp-elbowed assistant, Simone (played by Milly Alcock), but things are thrown into chaos with the arrival of an unexpected guest: Simone's down-at-heel, grimly judgmental sister, Devon (Meghann Fahy).
The theatricality of the setup—the disruptive stranger, the impending event that will inevitably go very wrong—isn't happenstance. Sirens was originally a play by the writer Molly Smith Metzler (Maid, Orange Is the New Black), which premiered in 2011 under the title Elemeno Pea. Fully Netflixed by Metzler into a five-episode adaptation, the final product is a triumph of the popular-novel-to-series genre: funny, caustic, absurd. The point of this kind of show, typically, is to marry coastal-mansion lifestyle porn with a little light mystery—a body swept onto shore, a metaphorical skeleton rattling its way out of the walk-in closet. On Netflix's The Perfect Couple, for instance (a 2024 adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand's novel of the same name), the question of who murdered a wedding guest is less gripping than Kidman's high-diva turn as a matriarch with a perplexingly ambiguous accent who's as stiff as a Barbie doll in pale-pink silk.
[Read: Nicole Kidman's perpetual trick]
Sirens, though, has a more satirical bent, a whiff of White Lotus–esque eat-the-rich cynicism and some truly jarring insight into the bought intimacies of lonely 0.001-percenters. By focusing on the scruffy, foul-mouthed Devon—who waits tables in a falafel shop and has been single-handedly caring for her and Simone's ailing father (Bill Camp)—the show sets up a collision based on class, an outsider's dissection of this strange new world. In the first episode, Devon, enraged by an Edible Arrangement her sister has sent in lieu of actually responding to her texts or helping at home, furiously carts said fruit basket via bus, ferry, and a miles-long walk in order to throw lukewarm pieces of melon at Simone. 'Don't send me fruit, you stupid bitch,' Devon shrieks, adding, with confusion, 'Who are you? No, seriously. You're dressed like a doily.'
Fahy has played the sphinxlike wife of a compulsive cheater on The White Lotus, and the sassy sidekick of a bride-to-be on The Perfect Couple. Devon is darker, and much funnier—sour, sweaty, gulping water from a sprinkler by the side of the road in early scenes while an appalled dog walker watches. She's desperate to liberate Simone from what she sees as a fundamentally toxic job, but Simone, a yapping blond lapdog in Lilly Pulitzer, has never felt more herself than she does under Michaela's wing. And casting Moore is a fascinating stretch—she's an actor better known for embodying wounded birds than temperamental alphas, and so her Michaela feels notably vulnerable from the get-go. Fittingly, Michaela's quirk is that she's turned her billionaire husband's compound into a sanctuary for rescued raptors, tending to birds of prey so that they can be unleashed into the wild to kill things anew. Her other hobby, so to speak, is described by her acolytes as her 'radical generosity'—spending astonishing amounts of money to help women from humble backgrounds ascend to the highest climbs of society. Devon, you sense, might be her greatest challenge yet.
As thrilling as Fahy is to watch, in some ways, the dynamic between Michaela and Simone is the least predictable part of Sirens: the controlled, high-strung society queen being endlessly fussed over by her enthralled attendant. In the first episode, Simone and Michaela check the state of each other's breath before an event; when Simone's fails to pass muster, Michaela gives her assistant her own chewed-up piece of gum, which Simone pops into her mouth without hesitation. Simone also helps Michaela sext her husband, a billionaire named Peter Kell (played irresistibly by Kevin Bacon), squeezing Michaela's breasts together and drafting language that's 'dirty but not too dirty.' And maybe it's the Careless People of it all, but I gasped out loud when a fragile Michaela climbed into bed for the night next to Simone, gazing into her assistant's eyes and demanding secrets like an 8-year-old at a sleepover.
[Read: The awful secret of wealth privilege]
Metzler is clearly fascinated by money and class, particularly as they intersect with gender. Maid, which starred Margaret Qualley as a young mother who flees an abusive relationship and ends up balancing on a knife-edge of homelessness and badly paid domestic work cleaning rich people's houses, took pains to communicate all the ways in which surviving poverty is its own full-time job. Sirens carefully contrasts the repetitive, arduous work done by Michaela's staff with the #werk performed by Michaela and her devotees. Simone's job skirts the two—she's expected to fawn over her boss and to buttress her emotionally while also dealing with the unpleasant parts of managing a household that Michaela would rather outsource. But Sirens is also particularly thoughtful on the subject of power and how women often wield it, blurring lines between obligation and intimacy—and knowing, always, that the terms of unspecified relationships can change without warning.
Nevertheless, Sirens is a very fun show. In a requisite shopping scene, as Devon is made into a woman fit to attend Michaela's gala, she wears a sulky sneer throughout that offsets the $22,000 spotted monstrosity her new companions dress her in. ('I look like Beetlejuice!') Even while the series seems to sense that the dynamics between the three women are the reason we're watching, it continually throws up haphazard potential mysteries: cult-like antics, reclusive former spouses, all those birds. I understand why, but they're much less diverting than the relationships the show excavates, the loyalty and love you can buy but never fully count on.
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Article originally published at The Atlantic