11 Signs You’re Watching a Motherthriller

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Vince Valitutti/Peacock, Glen Wilson/Prime Video, HBO

A husband raises his hand in anger. A group of women in designer neutrals and Jennifer Meyer jewelry console each other on a cream-colored couch. Blood splatters across the wall of a gigantic mansion (or along a posh neighborhood street). A police officer rolls their eyes at the insularity of the elite. Both an outsider with a mysterious past — and the working class overall — are held at arm’s length. Nicole Kidman wears either an unfortunate wig or an exceptional coat, and the main cast is a collection of caucacity. The source material is a book that was in some celebrity’s book club, probably the same celebrity who produced the show. If you’re watching a TV series with some combination of these elements, congratulations: You’re devoting the next seven to ten hours of your life to the episodic motherthriller.

When considering the current state of dramatic television for and about women, one cannot escape the motherthriller. The subgenre is prevalent and pervasive, with nearly every new series of this type coming from the same creators or producers, deploying the same tragedies as the impetus for action, focusing on the same tax bracket, and centering the same marriage-and-kids problems. The lineup includes Big Little Lies (2017), Little Fires Everywhere (2020), The Undoing (2020), Nine Perfect Strangers (2021), The Last Thing He Told Me (2023), The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart (2023), Expats (2024), and now, Apples Never Fall, which debuted in full on Peacock March 14.

Unlike similar thriller series starring women (Surface, The Girl Before, Pieces of Her, Black Cake, and Behind Her Eyes), the motherthriller is always grasping for some kind of grand statement about female solidarity and unwilling to deviate from the sense that it’s saying something important about what it means to be a woman. Years of this format have dulled the subgenre’s once-sharp observations about the internal lives of wives and mothers, and the increasingly narrow focus on the wealthy and white has become monotonous. Peacock’s Apples Never Fall is the latest iteration of the format, and its predictability is straight out of the subgenre’s playbook.

Big Little Lies starts by telling us someone has died, and the first season is driven by the mystery of who and why; The Undoing gives us the victim, then chases down the perpetrator; the very title of The Last Thing He Told Me lets us know the titular “he” is gone. These series use immediate urgency to draw us in, align us with the women affected by this violence, and make us care enough to keep watching. Apples Never Fall grows in that same genre orchard. (Sorry.) The miniseries follows the Delaney family, who should be happy — Stan (Sam Neill) and Joy (Annette Bening) are former tennis stars, they live in a beautiful coastal Florida mansion, and their grown kids are all attractive, healthy, and seemingly successful in their own right. But faded star Stan relentlessly pushed his four children to pursue their own athletic stardom, butted heads with Joy when she prodded him to be kinder, and eventually graduated to physical abuse. When Joy disappears six months after the mysterious stranger Savannah (Georgia Flood) spent weeks living with Stan and Joy and ingratiating herself into their lives, the family starts pointing fingers at each other to figure out what could have happened to the wife and mother they never appreciated as much as they should have.

On the one hand, it is essential for women to be honest about the labor and esteem disparity in relationships and about how children are quite often annoying, ungrateful monsters. (At least, this is what I learned from Big Little Lies and The Undoing.) On the other hand, these series mostly promote the archetype of “conventionally beautiful mom who is frazzled by all her responsibilities despite having the money and social cache to hire support staff, and refuses to be honest with her family about her loneliness because there wouldn’t be a show if these characters didn’t constantly miscommunicate.” (The Expats episode “Central,” a rare exception, defies this trope by focusing on the protagonists’ domestic help.) In Apples Never Fall, Joy is cast from this mold, frustrated for decades by her family derailing her promising tennis career — and the fact that her husband and children are all jerks. But the series skimps on the character development necessary for us to understand the extent of Joy’s frustrations. What does she complain about to her friends? How does she fill her days as a retiree? Bening does solid work conveying little windows into Joy’s irritation (she has a great squint), but six of the seven episodes are about a different member of the family, and placing Joy’s last means the character is underdeveloped until the very end.

Most of these series have a core of primarily white actors and relegate characters of different ethnicities to supporting roles, like the cops investigating whatever mystery kicks off the show. In The Undoing, Édgar Ramírez plays the detective doubtful that Hugh Grant’s character is innocent of killing his Latina lover. In Big Little Lies, Merrin Dungey questions a friend group composed primarily of white women. Tiffany Boone and Manny Jacinto play assistants to Kidman’s Russian Svengali wellness expert in Nine Perfect Strangers. There are some exceptions: Little Fires Everywhere centers a Black family led by Kerry Washington, Big Little Lies gives more screen time to Zoë Kravitz’s Bonnie in season two, and Nine Perfect Strangers’ MVP is Regina Hall, a scene-stealer who gives a half-soapy, half-heartbreaking performance as a woman pushed to her limits because of her husband’s infidelity with (gasp!) Kidman’s character. The first two series also, to varying degrees, probe the impact of racism on elite spaces. But none of this is in Apples Never Fall. A few people in the Delaneys’ lives are Black, South American, and South Asian, but they’re fairly ancillary. Interestingly, Stan’s former star pupil, Harry Haddad, has a distinctly Arabic last name but is played by the very white Giles Matthey.

Witherspoon has essentially created a pipeline from her book club to her production company; after kicking off the Liane Moriarty craze with Big Little Lies, she produced Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng and The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave. What Witherspoon doesn’t produce through Hello Sunshine, Nicole Kidman’s Blossom Films often takes on: The Undoing, based on You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz; Expats, based on The Expatriates by Janice Y. K. Lee; Nine Perfect Strangers (Moriarty again!); and Elin Hilderbrand’s The Perfect Couple, forthcoming at Netflix. Apples Never Fall is also a Moriarty joint, with Bening taking on the producer mantle here. Other Moriarty adaptations are in various stages of development: Kidman and Witherspoon optioned Truly Madly Guilty years ago, and Kidman will star in and produce a miniseries version of The Last Anniversary. These women have cornered the market on a specific type of story, and Kelley is a common collaborator in translating the page to the screen; he’s worked on Big Little Lies, The Undoing, and Nine Perfect Strangers. (And he’s reteaming with Kidman for a series version of Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe.)

These stories owe so much to Rashomon in the way they begin with a shocking crime or mystery before layering in conflicting perspectives to world-build the characters and locations. Domestic abuse and a devastating fire start off The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, a disappearance The Last Thing He Told Me, a dead or missing child in Expats. As each series progresses, we spend time with various characters to see the impact of all this damage.

Kidman is the most common face of the motherthriller, but Witherspoon is up there, too. For the most part, if these women produce a series, they’re going to headline in it. Otherwise, this genre provides opportunities for actresses nearing or over the dreaded Hollywood age of 40 — some of whom are established TV stars (Washington, Jennifer Garner), some who are primarily movie stars (Bening, Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver), and some who’ve spent their careers moving between mediums (Laura Dern, Melissa McCarthy, Rosemarie DeWitt). We can only assume Kidman’s schedule was too packed with any of her eight upcoming projects (and maybe Big Little Lies season three), filming new AMC Theatres ads, and attending the Eras tour to join the Australia-based production of Apples Never Fall.

To be fair, the series that actually engage with race also engage with socioeconomics (Little Fires Everywhere, that one episode of Expats) and ensure their not-rich characters feel like actual people, so we can exclude them from this rule. But shows like Big Little Lies, The Undoing, and Apples Never Fall get a lot of narrative leverage out of outsiders being suspected as villains, or at the very least, depicted as if they don’t belong in these exclusive communities and among these fancy people. In BLL, it takes a while for the Monterey housewives to accept Shailene Woodley’s single mother as one of them; in The Undoing, the protag’s social circle assumes the working-class husband of a murdered woman her killer because of financial pressure and his inherent Latino temper; the most disappointing thing about Apples Never Fall is how satisfied it is not interrogating why the Delaneys are so comfortable treating someone from outside their Zip Code with condescension and contempt.

You name it, they’ve got it: dead parents/spouses/kids, a past filled with domestic abuse or sexual violence, abandonment. Can you believe all they needed to do to feel better was open up about it? (Or, sometimes, kill someone.)

Because so many of these shows are about troubled or dysfunctional marriages, they chart a woman’s growth by her willingness to separate from her husband by the end of the season or miniseries. (This is Kidman’s specialty.) A sense of closure comes about via a solved murder in Big Little Lies and The Undoing, mystery answered in The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart or The Last Thing He Told Me, or the burn-it-all-down catharsis of Little Fires Everywhere. But that final one is rare. These characters will nearly always still be rich and maintain the worldview attached to that, remain (or become) loving mothers who have meaningful relationships with their children, and find the strength within themselves to carry on. There’s a comfort to this kind of predictability, but there’s also stagnation, a tidiness that suggests changing only one thing about your life — most often a romantic partner — is enough to catapult you into a happiness that demands no other reassessments or self-criticism, and certainly no drop in economic affluence. These are fantasies, really, with an array of tropes that are as inflexible as they’re meant to be affirming.

Although Apples Never Fall mostly wraps up what happened to Joy and how the Delaneys move on, it does leave a specific narrative door open to a future installment. Do we need a second season of Nine Perfect Strangers or The Last Thing He Told Me? A third season of Big Little Lies? We do not, but they’re coming anyway. Everything is IP now, yadda yadda yadda.

You know, it is. A fair number of recent comedies — especially ones set in the workplace — explore women’s friendships, rivalries, ambitions, and identities with more nuance and flair. Girls5eva gives us women who admire and compete against each other in ways alternately wacky and grounded; Abbott Elementary, intergenerational mentorships and friendships; Dead to Me, a best-friendship of soap-opera twists and very tangible emotional devastation; Tiny Beautiful Things, a compelling mother-daughter relationship between Kathryn Hahn and Merritt Wever; We Are Lady Parts, a triumph of self-discovery through the experience of screaming along to System of a Down’s “Toxicity” in a car full of other female punk musicians. Apples Never Fall is well acted and watchable, but it’s not breaking any ground. For that feeling in a woman’s story, comedy is where to look.