Ben Watches Television : The Outsider - "Dark Uncle"
* This review contains spoilers for the first three episodes *
This week’s episode of The Outsider picks up right after the death of Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman). Ralph Anderson (Ben Mendelsohn) is in administrative leave following the courthouse shooting and passes time by acting like he’s not on leave at all and continues to investigate the contradicting evidence in the case. Maitland’s youngest daughter Maya (Summer Fontana) is visited by a strange looking man who wants her to give Ralph a message and Alec Pelley (Jeremy Bobb) hires Holly Gibney (the wonderful Cynthia Erivo) to investigate the Maitlands trip to Dayton.
A lot of shit happens.
*
But it is good?
Once again, it’s tough to say. The Outsider feels more familiar than anything else. Last night’s episode reminded me of the ever popular true crime documentaries that have been swarming Netflix like an unfortunate rash over the last decade. The characters are investigating and unsolvable crime and suffering in their own insular way, for our voyeuristic pleasure. There was an obscene amount of suffering in Dark Uncle: Ralph grief over his son, Glory Maitland (Julianne Nicholson)’s grief over her husband, Holly Gibney’s grief over the person she never was, etc.
The Outsider (so far) has more in common with true crime documentaries than other forms of fiction. It put us through three episodes of people idiosyncratically suffering over a mystery none of them can solve on their own. Isn’t it why we like true crime in the first place? To try and bridge the gap between fragments of a story ourselves? There’s very little sense of an inherent threat going on. Richard Price is still methodically moving his piece on the chessboard, but none of the important characters have anything to lose. The investigation is driven from a very intellectual place.
The boldest moment in Dark Uncle comes when Jack Hoskins (wonderfully interpreted by Marc Menchaca) is visited by an invisible being in the barn where the police found Terry Maitland’s clothes. Although Menchaca is selling it like there’s no tomorrow, interacting with an invisible foe on screen will always look somewhat goofy. It’s what tanked the otherwise marvelous It Follows and it’s a problem here, too. After literally SHOWING us the outsider last week, why would he become invisible all of a sudden? The show’s not being creatively resourceful.
What would it have been to show us the outsider through a mirror or some contraption that still left doubt as to whether or not he really exists? I thought the Hoskins segment exemplified The Outsider’s lack of storytelling cleverness.
What I’m trying to say here is that The Outsider is unbearably slow and that it clumsily incorporates supernatural elements. I shouldn’t be surprised, because Stephen King’s novel has many similar issues. Three episodes in, showrunner Richard Price has yet to give us a water cooler moment. A signature scene that would launch The Outsider into cultural discourse and build anticipation for next week’s epsiode. I understand it’s a slow burn by nature, but episodic television is supposed to give us something to hang on to for seven days and The Outsider has yet to do that.
