Why Mrs Fletcher is the most underrated show on TV right now
Mrs Fletcher is not a show likely to inspire a rabid fanbase. The HBO miniseries, based on the 2017 Tom Perrotta novel of the same name, is a small show, in the vein of Ramy, Shrill or Fleabag: half-hour series whose worlds revolve around one deep, rich well of a character surrounded by a knockout supporting cast. But where, say, Shrill rocket-launches one millennial woman’s self-acceptance (and writing career) and Fleabag shatters, well, everything, Mrs Fletcher is decidedly more understated, indecisive, moody.
Its namesake, Eve Fletcher (Kathryn Hahn), is a mid-40s single mother in suburbia whose attempts to bond with and discipline her teenage son, Brendan (Jackson White), ring so hollow – in the first episode, she demands he helps load the van for college, then sweatily does so herself while he gets one last blow job inside – that his absence leaves her a shell. Brendan’s journey from confident lax bro douche to loser isolated by his own outdated expectations of sex and consent in college forms the show’s surprisingly refreshing and tricky B plot. But Mrs Fletcher belongs to Eve, which is to say, the brilliant Hahn, as she tries to rediscover herself after years of glomming to the influence of her son or perpetually disappointing ex-husband (Josh Hamilton).
Promotion for the show has prominently featured Hahn in bed with a laptop, and fittingly, both characters’ worldviews are shaped by online porn – for Brendan, it’s a limitation, an assumed set of degrading expectations for language and sex (his mom, in the first episode, is horrified to overhear him call the aforementioned hookup a “dirty fucking slut”). But for Eve it offers potential liberation, a pass into a world of unfiltered desire and a chance to unlock parts of the self long battened down. Much of that process is internal; the show has a habit of communicating what I imagine would be interior monologues in the book (which I, like probably most of HBO’s viewing audience, have not read) with small studies of Hahn or dream sequences. Eve stumbles on explicit Milf pictures and slams the laptop shut, only to warily reopen it; a steamy fantasy with a saleswoman starts and ends with a free popsicle sample at the grocery store.
In other words, Mrs Fletcher leans heavily on the thought of sex, less on the action. Several critics have pointed out that Mrs. Fletcher is uneven, at times unsatisfying, a messy misfire. But that messiness is what, for me, makes Mrs Fletcher the most underrated show on TV right now. It’s ambitious in its understatement, trying to convey the gravitational pull of the uncensored internet or the wooziness of IRL fantasy. At a dinner party, she is halting and unsure, deflecting a potential date with flashbacks to the porn she watched on her couch hours before. Her motivations are, to be fair, scattered – but that scatteredness, even as she still performs the duties of competent senior center employee and mother, feels more real to the mundanity of self-discovery than the drama. (It helps that she’s played by Hahn, whose portrayal of sloppy sexiness and hard-won resilience is truly spectacular.)
Mrs Fletcher may lack the narrative propulsion of most TV shows – she flirts with a 19-year-old classmate of her son’s (Owen Teague) in her community college writing class (one of the more unlikely romantic subplots to root for but … it works!), then catches herself, or imagines walking into a massage parlor of the Robert Kraft variety but doesn’t leave her minivan in the parking lot. But it allows its characters to be inconsistent in a way that feels disarmingly human, and refreshing at a time when the work of publicly presenting the self steers more and more toward artificial consistency, a strong personal brand.
In the second episode, Eve’s writing teacher (Jen Richards) asks each of the students what they fear. “You know that feeling that you’re convinced you left the oven on even though you haven’t?” says Eve. “I’ve been having that feeling a lot since my son went to college.” The teacher, warmly, asks what it’s about. “I don’t know,” Eve replies. “That’s what scares me.”
Mrs Fletcher offers few answers to that fear; no one names it. The class ends, and Eve continues to swing in and out of that ring of identity crisis. The ambivalence of Mrs Fletcher is admittedly a tough sell, which is not to say that Eve doesn’t transform over the course of the season, take some risks and tell some more men to fuck off. Or that the ending (sans spoilers) is ultimately a letdown (of the “was this actually the last episode?” type) especially given the news that there still likely won’t be a second season. But that not knowing, pausing the drive for resolution to explore one’s messy present, feels like a more revelatory endpoint in itself.
Mrs Fletcher is now showing on HBO and will be available on Sky Atlantic in January
full of water, in which a naked Antony Gormley statue stands up to his shins, gazing at his cupped hands.
7. Westminster
A jaded stage set for the rituals of monarchy, but its ambulatory is a fascinating junk shop of memorials of the great and no longer great, Highgate cemetery come to town. Beyond lies Henry VII’s chapel, which, with its fan vault and dripping pendants, is surely the most dazzling interior in the land.
6. York
A thumping Perpendicular palace, awesome from around the city walls. The largest cathedral by volume in England, with its newly restored east window containing the finest medieval glass.
5. Canterbury
Silvery limestone towers beckon pilgrims across the Kent landscape to the earliest gothic work in England. A gruesome statue marks the spot where Thomas Becket died. The ancient crypt carvings are both terrifying and hilarious.
4. Durham
A massive assertion of Norman power over the rebellious north, it’s
The ship of the Fens, its towers best seen floating on a morning mist across the fields. The swirling upward view inside the central lantern is near psychedelic – the view down from the gallery no less so. Exquisite carvings in its Lady Chapel still bear the scars of iconoclast vandalism.
1. Wells
Its sculpted west front glows incomparably in the sunset, its giant scissor arches uplift its crossing, and its column capitals offer an encyclopedia of medieval life. Wells also boasts the most serene chapter house anywhere.
Simon Jenkins’s England’s Cathedrals is published by Little, Brown