The three leads make Sirens an enjoyable, uneven black comedy, with Meghann Fahy its chief pleasure. The wealthy eccentrics are familiar and the changes of tone can be clumsy, but the sisters’ strained relationship earns our interest.
Sirens is an enjoyable black comedy, held together by three excellent performances when its shifts in tone become awkward. Directed by Nicole Kassell, Quyen Tran and Lila Neugebauer, it mixes the peculiar behaviour of rich people with the less easily laughed-off grievances of two sisters. The interest lies in how readily family loyalties can compete with the promise of a more comfortable life. That is enough to sustain five episodes, even when the programme cannot decide how seriously to take its own discomfort.
Meghann Fahy’s Devon DeWitt makes the wealthy company difficult to accept on its own terms. Her profanity is funny because it sounds like impatience with an arrangement everyone else has agreed not to question. We laughed at her swearing, and at the exasperation Fahy puts behind it. There is also enough hurt in her performance to stop Devon becoming merely the person appointed to tell us that rich people are ridiculous.
Milly Alcock makes Simone DeWitt sufficiently difficult that the sisters’ relationship resists an easy allocation of sympathy. Their scenes have the irritation of people who know too much about each other to accept a fresh account of who either has become. Julianne Moore’s Michaela Kell gives their quarrel another complication: her charisma makes the attraction of this wealthy circle credible. Moore is persuasive enough that the cultish atmosphere does not need to be underlined quite as often as it is.
Gregory Middleton and Zoë White photograph the wealth with an inviting brightness, which makes Devon’s resistance more interesting than it would be in an obviously sinister setting. John Paino’s production design gives the characters’ privilege a visible presence, although the luxuriant surroundings are familiar from other programmes about the rich. These spaces make the attraction of belonging clear without much explanation. The images do their work; the satire has to do more than notice how absurd everyone looks inside them.
That is where the writing by Molly Smith Metzler, Bekah Brunstetter and Colin McKenna becomes uneven. The observations about class are recognisable, but the family grievances are more particular and more involving. A joke can sit beside distress without cancelling it, yet here the changes sometimes feel as though the programme has lost interest in the feeling it has just asked us to share. The sisters keep that from becoming fatal, because their resentment remains worth attending to even when the surrounding comedy turns broad.
Editors Jen Bryson, Isaac Hagy, Laura Zempel and Catherine Haight keep the episodes brisk, a considerable advantage in a story with so many competing tones. The speed also means that some emotional shifts receive less space than they need, so the family drama can seem hurried. Michael Abels’s music helps sustain the unease, but cannot make each change of mood convincing. We would have welcomed a little more time with the sisters, even at the expense of another rich person’s eccentricity.
The more useful question is why someone might prefer these people’s company to their own family’s. When Sirens takes that wish seriously, the family drama becomes uncomfortable in a way the jokes about wealth seldom manage. It gives the actresses something difficult to play, and they are persuasive enough to make an uneven script worth following. Give it an evening if difficult sisters and expensive bad behaviour are your sort of company.
