Lower your expectations … Brooke Shields in You’re Killing Me. Photograph: Mike Tompkins/AcornTV
I desperately wanted this show to be Gilmore Girls meets Murder, She Wrote – but the story of a novelist turned amateur sleuth is just so lazy. And yet, I still have high hopes for the confirmed second season
Look, we all want Brooke Shields to be in gainful employment. We all want her to have a fabulous third act to her career. God knows, the child model turned star of prurient fever dreams Pretty Baby and The Blue Lagoon (and the “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins” jeans ad campaign when she was 15) has earned it. Plus, she did a fine turn in Friends and a number of us remember Suddenly Susan very fondly.
But she’s terrible in the terrible new thing she’s in, which is a six-part comedy drama called You’re Killing Me. Shields plays successful cosy mystery novelist Allison Chandler, who lives in the picturesque town of Founder’s Cove, Maine. It’s Murder, She Wrote vibes all right, but please lower your expectations.
Allison’s publishers are beginning to make noises about the need to attract a younger demographic to her books. Allison – who is less a character than a loose assemblage of simple responses to stimulants, though things improve slightly after the pilot – is outraged. She is also incredibly rude to young true crime podcaster Andi (Amalia Williamson), who comes to her book signing, because she knows Andi has called her work “outdated and inaccurate”. But when her sleazebag pal Nash Gilbert (Matthew MacFadzean) suggests that her latest book maybe isn’t her best work, she executes her reflection-response instead. Could the times actually be a-changing and leaving her behind? If only there was a young person around to ask and maybe learn from, however antagonistic she might be.
Someone to learn from? … You’re Killing Me. Photograph: Mike Tompkins/AcornTV
Alas, before Nash can guide her further on this voyage of self-discovery, he has plummeted to his death from a balcony. An apparent suicide – or is it? Soon, whichever AI monkey is in charge of storyboarding has contrived to bring Andi and Allison together to investigate what they believe to be murder. Soon the police, led by new county detective Coppy McCopface – sorry, I mean Jack Kerrigan (Tom Cavanagh) – agree. Plot is added (a blackmail setup, a naive stepdaughter, impromptu gift shop closures become pivotal, people are flung into car boots when the monkey realises nothing as happened for a while). Murder suspects duly emerge, are given a grilling by Allison and/or Andi, establish their alibis and then are banished to the wings until it is time for one of them to re-emerge and drop himself in it.
Repeat with one new murder a week (adulterated EpiPen at a wedding, electrocution in a hot tub, and so on) set against the background of Andi and Allison learning to live, laugh, love and write a book together. It’s not the publishing deal you get that matters, of course – it’s the intergenerational bickering you are scripted along the way.
There needs to be a moratorium on boomers/gen Xers watching in horror as young ’uns give their lengthy coffee orders to baristas. And on the latter explaining basic mobile phone functions to them. And on the former reacting like Victorian dowagers when they hear a word like “chatbot” or “Zoom”. I don’t know what the average age of the writers on You’re Killing Me is, but someone needs to tell them that Allison/Shields is 61, not 106. She would know what cancelling someone means and that it is not done by an annoyed woman shouting “I cancel you!” at another. Come on.
She’s 61, not 106 … You’re Killing Me. Photograph: Mike Tompkins/AcornTV
The whole thing is thin, lazy and so disappointing. It could have been fine – maybe even good. The setup has perfectly legitimate dramedy potential, with each of the two main characters having what the other lacks in terms of skills, experience and attitude. With a little effort, a little genuine wit, intergenerational stuff can be fun, funny and occasionally even illuminating. Someone somewhere should have thought to try it. Shields can do comedy, but here is thrown back on shrillness and interminably hamming it up to try to make things stick. Williamson is clearly capable of much more, too, but Andi is written mostly as an arrogant brat and there is nowhere really to take her.
All that said – and I could say more – it has just enough charm (and honestly, if I could work out how, I would bottle it, sell it and retire to a picturesque cove of my own) and enough goodwill attached to Shields that I greet the news that it has been commissioned for a second series with hope rather than despair. I want it to work. I want it to improve, like it did – slightly – between pilot and subsequent episodes, and to become the Gilmore Girls-inflected, Murder, She Wrote homage it once flickeringly promised to be. But they do say that it’s the hope, at least as often as poisoned EpiPens, that kills you.
