Reviews
Fool Me Once (Netflix, 8 Episodes)
Rating: 2.5/5
Starring: Michelle Keegan, Dino Fetscher, Richard Armitage, Joanna Lumley
Directed by David Moore, Nimer Rashid
"Fool Me Once" tries too hard to be suspenseful and sexy, and the effort shows. The narration strains at the seams to grab our attention. The plot is intriguing in essence: a woman's husband is killed, yet she sees him alive on her nanny cam with their young daughter.
That's it! This plotline seems to have been shared among all the shareholders, stretching a short film of twenty minutes into an excruciating eight episodes of agonizing twists and turns that will make no sense even to those viewers who keep rewinding to find out if they missed something.
There is plenty wrong with "Fool Me Once" (quite a self-deprecatory title, that!). For one, it is overloaded with plotting devices. Clearly, the writers didn't have enough confidence in their basic idea, or they knew it couldn't be stretched to eight episodes. While Maya Stern (played by Michelle Keegen, pretty but not quite the actor to shoulder a whole series) is looking for clues to her "dead" husband's whereabouts, locking horns with her mother-in-law (Joanna Lumley) who insists she has buried her son with her own hands, the truth lies writhing on the floor.
This absurd series goes from illogical to downright preposterous and then some silly too.
The levels of subterfuge that the plot lays out for Maya don't match up with the plotting mechanism, which develops major snags long before the journey is over. Too many coincidences are used to join the dots. Characters pop up without rhyme or reason, with a "what-are-you-doing-here" kind of response from others that matches up exactly with what we feel, but doesn't justify the sheer absurdity of the coincidences.
Sami Kierce (played by Adeel Akhtar) is the detective who goes around looking so pained and bewildered he could be a refugee from Afghanistan seeking asylum in a series where the pain is not only manageable but ludicrously uncorroborated. I like Sami's partner, Marty McGregor (played by Dino Fetscher). He plays the young upstart trying to impress his veteran partner with punchlines to jokes that were never funny in the first place.
The series suffers from a similar sort of self-delusion. It believes in its own coiling-uncoiling narrative but cannot convince us that any of this could happen. We never get to like, let alone empathize with, any of the characters. The heroine Maya is so obstinate she reminds us of a child who orders everything she likes on the menu and then cannot even digest a portion of the food.
Likewise, the series looks laden with potentially interesting twists and turns but cannot pull off that whammy it had planned.
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