Undid/Destroy My Sweater

I initially wrote this simply to process my anger, but since HBO neglected to immediately release a new series to distract me and work is slow this week, allow me to present you with this belated rant on the finale of the HBO limited drama series The Undoing. 

********* Spoilers abound **********

The Undoing is based on a book, called You Should Have Known. (If this somehow implies that the adaptation is actually a satire of Prestige Dramas this is hilarious! Hats off to all involved, send me your address and expect an Edible Arrangement if that is still a business.) Anyway, I didn’t read the book. In the series, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant are a wealthy Upper East Side couple with a tweenaged son and a super involved father-in-law played by Donald Sutherland’s eyebrows. 

In the first episode, Nicole attends a Private School Mom’s fundraiser meeting, where a new Scholarship Mom, Elena, breastfeeds while making direct eye contact with Nicole. Later, Elena is pretty creepy to Nicole at the gym and the aforementioned fundraiser, then winds up murdered. Hugh disappears and Nicole learns her life is a lie. Good premise! Good actors! I'm in!

When I watch a series based on a book, I Google how the book ends after I finish the first episode. I don’t care if this makes you suspicious of me for the rest of your life, I was traumatized by early seasons of Game of Thrones and finding out who dies before I get invested is what I do now. 

In the book, we pretty much know Hugh is the murderer right off and Nicole stays at the beach house for the duration of the narrative which seems boring but also more like what you would actually do if your husband were accused of high profile murder. 

But the HBO premise is different: Nicole comes back to the city, and Hugh’s guilt is in question. The writers break themselves in half flinging red herrings all over Manhattan convincing us anyone could have done this, including Nicole, and then in the last minutes, about face entirely: HAHA TURNS OUT HUGH’S BEEN A SOCIOPATH HE’S GONNA HIGH SPEED CHASE OFF A BRIDGE NOW HIDE YA KIDS HIDE YA WIFE.

What? I know, we have to immediately overlook Hugh threat-promising his kidnapped son lobster while rapidly driving upstate, but criticizing this show requires you to overlook a lot of immediate issues to get to the bigger point, which is also what Nicole should have been doing for her entire marriage. 

My issues with this show are legion, and they all arise from its central laziness. You should be able to rewatch a whodunit and marvel ‘How did I not catch that?!’ Here, things unfold more like a friend making up a story to keep you from falling asleep with a head injury. For a late season crime procedural on the USA Network this is fine, but once you get D Suth’s eyebrows involved, I’m going to need you to try harder. 

Donald Sutherland is the best and most confusing part of this show. None of his actions make any sense, nor are they ever explained. The $500k he sobs about loaning to Hugh? Where did that go? Why does he loom outside Elena’s apartment in the middle of the night? Why take five minutes explaining exactly what kind of cocksucker he is to his grandson’s headmaster (the ‘traditional kind’ WHATEVER THAT IS)? We never get back to the cocksucking, either! They want us to think Donald killed Elena, I get it, but THAT MAKES NO SENSE. They don’t set this up in any way, they just encourage us to make the leap. They encourage us to make a lot of leaps.

The Undoing wants us to see Nicole as an unreliable narrator but simultaneously insists she’s a wildly competent human being. Rather than examining the compartmentalization of modern life that enables a duality of brilliance and negligence, she's riddled with a series of like, empathy-murder flashbacks? These are also never explained.

The story revolves around Elena’s murder, but we don’t learn much about Elena beyond the fact of her body. It is naked, it is dead. It makes it impossible to understand why anyone besides Hugh would care enough to kill her. Instead, they plant suggestions without any roots in the actual story: Donald at the apartment, Nicole with the walks and the flashbacks, even the son - like, hi, baby spaghetti arms did not mallet murder anyone, just stop it. This show is constantly hinting at something darker but never delivering. 

It’s confusing, because there is real darkness here: a family so disconnected a grandmother doesn’t know to warn her unmet grandson, the brilliant psychologist so overburdened she doesn’t notice the sociopath sharing her bed. Instead, the story plows ahead by tacking on new, unrelated information, and the beginning starts to unravel. Nowhere is this more evident than with the Cleveland alibi. 

In the pilot, it is established that Hugh is leaving to attend a medical conference in Cleveland. When he disappears, Nicole calls every hotel in Cleveland, even finding a guest with the same name. This took up a lot of screen time. They had to hire voice actors. This was intentional. But why, when they later go to great pains to show us that while, yes, Hugh was a murderous psychopath this whole time, when he went to Elena’s studio that night, he didn’t intend to kill her. So why pre-establish Cleveland?

WHY SET UP AN ELABORATE ALIBI IF YOU HAVE NO PLANS TO KILL ANYONE OR GO ANYWHERE? HOW CAN YOU JUST LEAVE THIS THREAD UNTIED? THIS IS A PAID CABLE SUBSCRIPTION, HBO, I HAVE EXPECTATIONS.

I understand what probably happened. There was probably another strand of this story that got snipped, and no one realized right away that it pulled the thread from the top. And I bet the person who pointed out ‘Hey, the Cleveland alibi doesn’t work anymore’ got yelled at and decided ‘you know what, fuck this job, air it’. If anyone can give me a more convincing explanation, you get the Edible Arrangement. 

And while I’m puzzling over Cleveland, there’s a restaurant scene where different waiters take separate trips to the table to deliver a bread basket, and then like, also breadsticks? It broke me. Unprofessionalism is amok on screen and I guess my point, if I have one at all, is this: pick a lane. Don’t present yourself as high complex drama and shortchange the viewer with garbage endings because they’re easy and exciting. Also, garbage is fine! If you want to be garbage, lean in! They could have taken this in a ridiculous, over-the-top direction, doubled down on the sex and blood and money and it would have been awesome. 

Think about it. Animal House. JFK. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Hunger Games. Keifer Sutherland! Donald Sutherland’s eyebrows can make magic happen. Make it worth their time. 

Further Reading: For a beautiful, insightful take on this show, please see Jane Dykema's piece in Electric Literature.