Wolf Like Me

Isla Fisher and Josh Gad star in a Peacock series that blends genres to intriguing effect

Long stretches of Peacock’s Wolf Like Me are basically a two-hander with characters played by Isla Fisher and Josh Gad embarking on a new romance while discussing the challenges of finding love in your 40s, opening yourself up and exposing your baggage to another person. They’re long conversations on park benches or across dinner tables, framed by writer-director Abe Forsythe to accentuate the emotional gulf between his protagonists.

Indeed, you might be perplexed to discover that Wolf Like Me is a show about strained relationships and the healing properties of love and openness — more like Scenes From a Marriage than the genre-defying, supernatural-adjacent series Peacock wants people to think it is. That’s the challenge of both writing about and watching Wolf Like Me; there’s the story Forsythe is telling, and then there’s the subtext he’s using to lure people in. It’s a show of broad metaphors — perhaps one or two too many — that don’t always feel fully realized in the moment but come together with pleasantly amusing potency over the course of six episodes.

The series is set in Adelaide, Australia, where single dad Gary (Gad) is still reeling from the death of his wife years earlier — and struggling with the possibility that his residual grief is warping his solemn tween daughter, Emma (Ariel Donoghue). A car accident leads him to Mary (Fisher), an advice columnist in mourning herself. Mary understands what Gary and Emma are going through, but she has a horrifying secret she can’t bring herself to share.

You’ll be able to guess Mary’s secret either from the show’s title, its trailers or the ominous buildup of the first episode.

What’s interesting isn’t the secret but the way Forsythe approaches it, which alternates between darkly humorous and almost matter-of-fact.

Without always connecting the dots, Forsythe also is dabbling in the cosmic.

The universe keeps bringing Mary and Gary together with one bizarre meet-cute after another; Emma tackles a school project on the solar system; Mary is fascinated with

Carl Sagan; and the series makes regular references to the Jewish mystical tradition of Shevirat ha-Kelim (the shattering of vessels to allow for both healing and the passage of light). It’s a lot to take in, and with episodes running less than 30 minutes apiece, Forsythe often opts for a general “See where I’m going with this?” wink and nudge rather than choosing a narrative or tonal lane.

But the series is held together by the core trio of stars, who work hard to sell the disparate elements and tones. Fisher is especially strong, playing Mary’s deeply wounded psyche and the comic side of her secret identity with equal sincerity. Whether you want to find Wolf Like Me utterly serious or likably silly, it’s all there in her performance, which made me laugh and tear up in equal measure. Gad, who worked with Forsythe on the similarly genre-bending zombie film Little Monsters, deserves credit for downplaying his normal high energy without resorting to that mawkish well that some funny actors wallow in when they want to convey gravity. Matching them is the less experienced Donoghue, whose somber sweetness makes you root for Gary and Mary as a couple perhaps more than any actual chemistry between them.

The Wolf Like Me finale, shot to great effect in the Australian Outback, pulls off the tough trick off being unresolved in a satisfying way — either to end the story or give Forsythe future opportunities to explore, but also possibly over-explain, the far-reaching themes.

I wound up enjoying the show’s balancing act enough that I don’t know which way I’d prefer it to go.

Isla Fisher is a woman nursing a dark secret and Josh Gad the single father with whom she strikes up a romance.