By the end of the first episode of Netflix’s new sci-fi series, The Boroughs, I thought to myself, “This is a really good TV show.” I binged the first half of the season in one evening, and would have kept watching if I could survive on zero hours of sleep.
Then, in the second half, The Boroughs, which has the Duffer Brothers attached as executive producers, just . . . fizzled out. To put it very succinctly, this would have been a great Netflix movie. As a series, it’s much too long and meandering.
The Boroughs is about a retirement community in New Mexico that seems very pleasant and Utopian on the surface but, like all Utopian places, harbors a sinister secret. We know something is up right from the get-to, when an elderly woman is killed by some kind of horrifying monster inside her home.
After this frightening intro, we meet our chief protagonist, Sam Cooper (Alfred Molina) a grouchy retiree who moves into The Boroughs against his will. His late wife had wanted to move there and he’d already signed a contract and invested his retirement savings into the place. He moves into the house where the woman in the opening scene was killed. For some reason, management hasn’t bothered to fix the doorknob that was blasted off during the attack.
Cooper is a curmudgeonly old grump, brisque with his daughter and rude to his son-in-law. He’s grieving the loss of his wife who, we learn in flashbacks, he loved very much. They were very close. Their relationship was almost saccharine-sweet, and these flashbacks are, in some ways, the first red flag that the show would dip too deep into the well of sentimentality. I’m not one to write off sentimentality, either. At first, my impression of this show was “A Man On The Inside meets Stranger Things” which is actually pretty dead-on. Netflix’s A Man On The Inside, at least its first season, is excellent and leans very heavily into sentimentality and sappy emotional character growth thanks to smart writing and a story that focuses more on the characters than on the plot.
But there is too much of a good thing. Whereas A Man On The Inside let its lead grapple with loss and grief and loneliness through the bonds he forms at the retirement home, The Boroughs is more interested in driving the plot. A Man On The Inside lets Charles (Ted Danson) form authentic friendships, while The Boroughs just barrels ahead, always in a rush with nowhere to go but down.
The problem is that there is simply not enough story here to justify eight episodes of television, and quite quickly in the second half of the season, it loses momentum. This is a shame, because there is a strong cast here. Alfre Woodard’s Judy Daniels is a really strong character and Woodard gives the best performance of the season by a landslide. Molina’s Cooper gets a strong start as the crotchety old widower who only grudgingly befriends his new nextdoor neighbor, Jack (Bill Pullman), but the show quickly makes it clear that this is an ensemble effort, and the focus on Sam as a central protagonist falls off quickly. Clarke Peters (of The Wire) also puts in a strong performance, though his character, Art Daniels, feels like a missed opportunity in a lot of ways. Everyone feels so disjointed from one another.
Where the cast really lost me – and probably the show’s second most obvious red flag – was Geena Davis. Davis plays Renee Joyce, a resident of The Boroughs who looks like she’s doing everything in her power to not look or act like a resident of The Boroughs. Her relationship with security guard, Paz (Carlos Miranda) is more than a little uncomfortable. Miranda is 41, Davis is 70, and regardless of the gender dynamics, a 29 year age-gap can be an awkward watch. (Much ado has been made over the age-gap between Alex Hassell and Bella Maclean’s characters in Hulu’s Rivals, and that’s only a 17-year split).
The fact that Renee and Paz’s relationship is barely explored – again, the plot demands that almost all exploration of actual relationships is quickly shoved aside – doesn’t help. Ultimately, all this achieves is making Davis feel like the odd-one-out, spending most of her arc running around with her side-piece rather than working with her neighbors. Very little is done to get the main characters to actually gel in the first place, and most of the time they’re off on side missions apart from the rest of the group.
The rest of the cast – Seth Numrich and Alice Kremelberg as Blaine and Annelise, the mysteriously beautiful young people in charge of The Boroughs; Denis O’Hare as the affable retired doctor, Wally – put in great performances. But the story itself, so concerned with rushing toward its conclusion, simply runs out of steam. By the end, I was bored, irritated with all the characters, annoyed at the heavy-handedness of the plot and its rather silly reveals . . . and just ready for it to be over. I regret recommending it to people based on the first four episodes. Most of the time I have a pretty good nose for these things, and a show like this gets out at least one good season before falling apart (Yellowjackets, for instance). Alas, the most spectacular thing about The Boroughs is the degree to which it implodes.
As a film, this would have been a lot of fun, and it very much reminded me of classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Cocoon. It would have benefited a great deal from the time constraints and character focus a movie would have necessitated. In the end, despite the early promise and intrigue, The Boroughs is just another bland, unsatisfying Netflix Original series limping and sputtering to its foregone conclusion.
