‘Apples Never Fall’ Review: A Rote, Off-the-Rack Whodunit

In the opening scene of Apples Never Fall, Joy Delaney (Annette Bening) takes a leisurely bike ride through West Palm Beach, Florida. She’s got the time, having recently retired after decades of coaching tennis alongside her husband, Stan (Sam Neill). Joy cycles by palm trees and mansions and stops to browse stands of impossibly perfect fruit. But as she passes tennis courts bustling with players, her mouth curves into a wistful frown.

A sense of melancholy nags at the superficial idyll of Joy’s excursion, only to burst into outright dread when we see her bike overturned in the street, its back wheel still spinning and its frame splattered with blood, and Joy nowhere to be found. This scene introduces an alluring air of mystery regarding Joy’s inner life and the nature of her seemingly utopian environment. Unfortunately, that intrigue proves incredibly short-lived—a victim of Apples Never Fall’s plodding pace, repetitive structure, and cardboard writing.

Adapted by Melanie Marnich from Liane Moriarty’s novel, the series jumps between two timelines on either side of Joy’s disappearance. The one set in the past begins with Joy and Stan adapting to a newly empty nest. The couple’s children rarely return their calls, and they can no longer whittle their days away with work. Late one night, they answer a knock at the door and discover a young, breathless, and wounded stranger named Savannah (Georgia Flood).

Part roomie, part chosen daughter, Savannah becomes a welcome distraction from the dullness of retirement for Joy and Stan, but her presence earns suspicion from their four kids: Amy (Alison Brie), a well-meaning but aimless life coach; Troy (Jake Lacy), the firstborn son who’s cocooned himself in the obscene wealth of venture capitalism; Logan (Conor Merrigan-Turner), who traded the stress of competitive sports for the zen of yoga and a houseboat; and Brooke (Essie Randles), a physical therapist whose business isn’t quite breaking even.

Each of the show’s episodes focuses on, and is named after, an individual character, paying special attention to their resentments and traumas. While this structure effectively conveys the alienation of the Delaneys, its formula quickly tires. Episodes spin their wheels—often with stilted conversations in which characters coyly talk around their thorny histories—until they end by doling out a twist. The Delaneys’ secrets, as a result, come to feel too conveniently locked off: not organic truths, but contrivances designed solely to prompt a hit on the play button.

In the show’s present-day timeline, smug detectives Elena Camacho (Jeanine Serralles) and Ethan Remy (Dylan Thuraisingham) try to piece together the puzzle of Joy’s case. Complicating matters are the Delaney clan’s fractured relationships, which have rendered them remarkably unhelpful. In “Logan,” the second episode, Camacho bemoans the near-total lack of insight the siblings have into their mother’s life. “They barely knew her,” she tells Remy.

The ultimate problem with Apples Never Fall is that we barely get to know Joy either. Or maybe it’s that we know her too well, given that we’ve seen innumerable Joys in countless other TV shows. She’s yet another unappreciated mother whose personality is largely limited to her function as an archetype—just as Stan is the familiar domineering father, and just as their children fill neat roles whose constraints they almost never rattle against.

There are occasional moments of catharsis that give the cast meatier material to work with. Episode five, “Troy,” includes an especially gripping scene in which the Delaneys finally allow their rage to froth over in a volcanic airing of grievances. But for most of Apples Never Fall’s seven episodes, the Delaneys feel like they were pulled off a rack. From all their soul-searching, revelations, and regrets, they emerge barely worn, nearly unwrinkled.