Although Peacock is the streaming platform of the powerful NBC television network, part of the conglomerate that also includes the cable provider Comcast and Universal Studios, earning a place in the hypercompetitive US market has not been easy. Therefore, when producer David Heyman, who launched the Harry Potter franchise for Warner Bros., brought them the rights to Liane Moriarty’s novel An Unexpected Reversal, his executives did not hesitate to launch a miniseries. After all, this was the same Australian writer who had created the books on which big hits like Big Little Lies, starring Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, and Nine Perfect Strangers, also starring Kidman and Melissa McCarthy, were based.
Heyman decided to take a different route and offer the role of Joy, the matriarch of the Delaney family protagonist of the novel, to five-time Academy Award nominee Annette Bening instead of Kidman, in part because the Australian actress was too young. to play the mother of four adult children. In this way, Bening made her return to the small screen almost two decades after starring in the HBO television film Mrs. Harris for which she was nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe, in a career in which her only other television participation was in an episode of The Sopranos.
Filmed mostly in Australia, but set in Miami, Unexpected Reversal, has been released by SkyShowtime in Spain adding the original English title Apples Never Fall, a play on words that literally means “Apples never fall”, but which alludes to A popular saying says that apples never fall far from the tree.
Initially the central theme of the series seems to be the strange disappearance of Bening’s character, a former professional tennis player who later became the owner of an academy for that sport, and how suspicions of a possible crime fall on her husband, another former tennis player and professor. played by Sam Neill, with a vast television career.
But it soon becomes clear that the real issue is the Delaneys’ complex family relationship. The double Golden Globe nominee for Glow, Alison Brie, is probably the best known of the actors called to play the children, in her case, in charge of Amy, who has serious problems keeping a job.
Jake Lacy, whose impressive participation in The White Lotus, for which he was also nominated for an Emmy, plays Troy, who leads a very good life as an investor. Essie Randles, with a brief acting career, plays Brooke, a lesbian and not very fortunate as a physiotherapist, and Conor Merrigan Turner, another relatively new actor, has the most promising role, that of Logan, the only one who has dedicated himself to tennis and cannot achieve break their close ties with their parents.
The series constantly jumps between the present, in which the four children and a couple of detectives try to figure out what has happened to Joy, and the past, which is where Annette shines, as an older woman who, despite her conflictive relationship with her husband tries to enjoy her retirement and “adopts” Savannah (Giorgia Flood), a mysterious young woman who one day knocks on her door saying that she is fleeing from an abusive boyfriend and ends up settling in her comfortable house, an event that can whether or not it has to do with what will happen to him in the future.
