Patricia Arquette’s charm propels this chaotic thriller
There is a surging new genre that I don’t think has a good name yet: the half-hour comedydrama-thriller. Drathrilcom? Comthrildrammer? The leading example is probably Barry, Bill Hader’s series about a hitman-actor, whose fourth and final series began on Sky Comedy last month. On the BBC there is also the excellent new series Black Ops, but it feels like a peculiarly streamerish phenomenon – an attempt to be all things to all viewers, or at least not to put anyone off in principle.
Now there is High Desert (Apple TV+), a comedy-drama-thriller set in the sun-baked plains of southern California. Patricia Arquette stars as Peggy, a woman with a troubled past who becomes an improbable PI. Peggy is an addict, by turns charming and erratic, who is trying to move on from her days as a criminal and the death of her mother. She is working in a Wild West theme park when she meets a down-on-his-luck private investigator, Bruce (Brad Garrett). She talks him into working together, and they are drawn into a plot involving a creepy “Guru Bob” (Rupert Friend enjoying himself), some gangsters and a possible Picasso. She pursues her new career at the same time as trying to reconcile herself with her past, and a strait-laced sister Dianne (Christine Taylor) who wants to move on. (When Dianne calls Peggy, the ringtone is the Ride of the Valkyries.)
There’s lots going on. If you are looking for a calm, measured drama,
High Desert is not for you. But Arquette is well cast, and her charisma propels the series through its changes of tone. She is funny enough to land the gags but plausible as a beleaguered addict, too. The Wild West detours provide the chance for Westworld-style action sequences, as well as an excellent comic supporting turn from Susan Park as Peggy’s co-worker Tammy.
High Desert, Barry, Black Ops and their like remind me slightly of the Renaissance theatre, where performers would cycle through the plays in their repertoire until they found one that suited the audience. Want a joke? Here’s a joke. Want a punch up? Here’s one. Want some intrigue, or loud rock music, or a gunfight, or a car crash, or a woman becoming depressed about her dead mother, or fighting her drug addiction? There you go. Just as Peggy is still there, despite being buffeted from all sides, I’m still here, even if I’m not quite sure what I’m watching.
Las Vegas is a city built on excess, a place where anything goes. It felt grimly apt that on October 1, 2017, it became the site of the USA’S worst mass shooting, too. Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old from Mesquite, opened fire from the window of his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, into the crowd of the Route 91 Harvest festival, where 20,000 people were gathered to watch the country music star Jason Aldean. In total he fired more than 1,000 rounds into the panicked crowd below, injuring 868 people – at least 400 by gunfire – killing 58, plus two more who died later from their injuries. Then he turned a gun on himself. When police finally got into his room, they found a vast arsenal, which Paddock had quietly assembled over several weeks.
This awful story is the subject of
11 Minutes: America’s Deadliest Mass Shooting (BBC Two), a four-part documentary series. Opening with a monologue by Storme Warren, a radio host, about the difficulty of bearing witness to such an event, 11 Minutes uses the extensive footage from phones and body cameras, along with a dozen or so interviews with people caught up in the shooting, to build a comprehensive picture of what it felt like from the ground. With so much documentary time to convey such brief real-life events, the effect is gruelling. Seconds are stretched into minutes. It’s obvious many – if not most – of the interviewees will be traumatised by the event for the rest of their lives.
As is fashionable today, the documentary – directed and produced by Jeff Zimbalist – shies away from naming the shooter for fear of lionising him and encouraging imitators. But its focus on the minutiae, while effective at building a sense of the terror of the time, comes at the expense of context. There is no faulting the testimony, but after two hours I was struggling to understand what it was telling us, other than how hellish it is to be under fire. It is telling how quickly the men and women finding themselves under fire understand what is happening, so routine are mass shootings in the US. But a more zoomed-out view would require the documentary to ask how a man was able to slowly accumulate 24 firearms in a hotel room, which in America is a political question. It’s no disservice to the victims to say that this could be shorter but also broader.
High Desert ★★★
11 Minutes: America’s Deadliest Mass Shooting ★★★