At this stage in his career, Ryan Murphy finds himself with two cruising speeds: real life stories (Feud, Halston, American Crime Story, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story) and horror (Ratched, American Horror Story). So you can imagine the absolute joy he must have felt when he first read Reeves Wiedeman’s 2018 New York Magazine article entitled The Watcher.
The article told the story of the Broaddus family who, upon buying the home of their dreams in Westfield, New Jersey, found themselves plagued by sinister letters from an unknown correspondent (called, you guessed it, The Watcher) who informed the family that their every move was being monitored. The letters, full of deliberately unsettling passages (“I am in charge of 657 Boulevard. It is not in charge of me. I will fend off its bad things and wait for it to become good again. It will not punish me. I will rise again”) seemed to be an attempt to spook the family into leaving the area.
Which, you have to admit, is an automatic Murphy slam-dunk. A real life story that reads like an overbaked horror novel? He must have been waiting for this his entire life. Forget that the story had already been made into a movie – 2016’s Lifetime film The Watcher (“Overall not a bad movie to kill time on a Sunday afternoon”, reads a typical Rotten Tomatoes user review) – this had Murphy written all over it. Imagine if Anna Delvey dabbled in cannibalism, or the people from WeCrashed were secretly werewolves. That’s the level of synergy we’re talking about here.
As you might expect, the new Netflix series The Watcher is a powerfully Murphyish watch. He co-created the show, co-wrote all the episodes bar one and also had time to direct a couple. If you like his shows, you will love this. If you don’t? Hey, at least it’s better than that godawful Jeffrey Dahmer thing.
Personally, I’d rank this somewhere in the upper-mid range of his work. There’s a sly sense throughout that Murphy and his collaborators know how silly the source material is. While never fully descending into parody, there are moments that (I hope intentionally) border on Mel Brooks.
This is the sort of show that really wants you to know that anyone could be behind the terrifying letter-writing campaign; something it achieves by turning the peripheral cast into a parade of goonish caricatures. Weird, identically dressed neighbours? Check. A pair of local historians who look like the American Gothic subjects after decades of surgical negligence? Check.
It is also jarring that the Broaddus’ home is in no way an attractive property. From the outside it looks like Tony Soprano’s McMansion, and the inside is riddled with secret rooms, hidden tunnels, pianos that appear to play themselves and something that can only really be described as Chekhov’s Dumb Waiter. Any sensible family would spend less than a microsecond there before getting the willies and running away.
At the very least, the cast is absolutely berserk. Here, the Broaddus family consists of Bobby Cannavale, Naomi Watts and their photogenic young children. The neighbours are played by Margot Martindale, Richard Kind and Mia Farrow. Noma Dumezweni is a private investigator. Jennifer Coolidge is an estate agent. And, without fail, they all get a chance to do the exact thing they are best at. Farrow is haunted and creepy, Watts is brittle and paranoid, Coolidge seems as if she walked on set having accidentally prepared for a completely different series to everyone else. More than anything, it is this cast that holds The Watcher together.
In truth, though, you can see why Lifetime jumped on the story first. Strip away the phenomenal acting talent, and some of the more outre decisions to liven up the source material, and what is left is a seven-hour whodunnit about a typewriter. It is Cannavale going batshit about envelopes for almost an entire working day. The Watcher is a world away from the daring, groundbreaking originals that Netflix used to seemingly conjure up from thin air. At times, it has the unfortunate air of an ITV drama that plays unwatched on a television above a budget gym treadmill.
I have no doubt that it is going to be huge, because that’s why Murphy is paid the big bucks, but there’s so little to it. I’d be staggered if anyone can remember a single thing about it come Christmas.
