![]() The people that Nora and Dean turn to for help - an arrogant, unmotivated local police detective (Christopher McDonald) a young security specialist named Dakota (Henry Hunter Hall), who takes an interest in Ellie and friend/real-estate agent Karen Calhoun (Jennifer Coolidge) - offer only modest help. “Let’s go make the most delicious fucking salad of our entire lives,” Mo hisses in Dean’s direction after he shouts at them for trespassing in the name of lettuce collection.Įccentric local historian Pearl Winslow (an astutely cast Mia Farrow) and her intellectually disabled brother Jasper (Terry Kinney) also have a tendency to pop up unannounced, sometimes even in the house’s dumbwaiter. Not long after settling in and starting to refurbish their kitchen, the Brannocks establish tense relationships with several of their neighbors, including Mitch (Richard Kind) and Mo (Margo Martindale), a husband and wife who have no compunctions about coming into the Brannocks’ yard to pluck arugula. Within the context of The Watcher, I really do mean that as a compliment. Ryan Murphy’s Law very much applies here: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong in the most batshit way possible. Consequently, a series of events that was genuinely bizarre becomes even freakier once the writers start sprinkling in even more wild details. But in the Netflix version, the Brannocks, who sink literally all of their savings into the property, fully occupy the home while attempting to figure out who’s harassing them and why, an effort that, particularly for Dean, becomes all consuming.īeyond that basic outline, Murphy and Brennan, who between them share co-writing credits on all seven episodes (Murphy also directs two), take significant liberties with the truth, which is probably for the best since the Broadduses apparently asked to make the fictional family resemble them as little as possible. The Broadduses, the couple who actually went through this traumatic experience, never moved into 657 Boulevard. The details in the letters - about the Brannocks’ children, Ellie (Isabel Gravitt) and Carter (Luke David Blumm), and the family’s behavior - become increasingly specific and disturbing. ![]() Like the couple that had this experience in real life, they begin to receive letters from an anonymous writer who says they are watching the house and implies it may be haunted. Like the true story on which it is based, The Watcher follows a married couple, Dean and Nora Brannock (Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts), as they purchase a majestically large house an hour outside of New York City at the coveted address of 657 Boulevard. This is an addictive work of television that invites us to examine our own frivolous, sometimes dangerous addictions. The Watcher can be over the top, but like the best of Murphy’s work, it knows it’s being over the top and often leans into its own excessiveness with a wink and a smirk. While that approach has its problems, namely an abundance of plot holes and red herrings, it makes for absorbing television, in part because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Murphy, Brennan, and their fellow writers and filmmakers (several of whom also worked on the duo’s extremely popular Dahmer) throw a kitchen sink of issues and true-crime tropes into these episodes, as well as a kitchen island controversially accented with butcher-block countertops. Among them: the housing market, home renovation, conspiracy theories, alcoholism, social media, and, of course, money. ![]() This limited series - based loosely on the story Reeves Wiedeman wrote for this magazine about a couple who bought their dream house in Westfield, New Jersey, only to be terrorized by anonymous letters from someone who creepily called themselves “The Watcher” - is subtextually a commentary on a variety of contemporary fixations. More than that, though, it knows what obsesses you. The Watcher, the new Netflix series created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, is also a suburban-real-estate cautionary tale that knows what scares you. “It knows what scares you” was the tagline for 1982’s Poltergeist, a horror classic that doubled as a cautionary tale about the dark side of desirable suburban real estate.
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