Somewhere Between - Netflix (10 episodes), 2017
Many spoilers ahead, but mostly mild to medium (not the main reveals).
The show Somewhere Between hooked me in the opening episode. We follow the news coverage and investigation of a serial killer and his trail of bodies (all women), and we follow the tragic event of the death of a child - a little girl who's the daughter of the city's District Attorney and the producer of one of the news stations covering the serial killer - after she was abducted and held for ransom. It all ends very badly. Even the mom dies trying to find and save her little girl.
All of a sudden, though, the show goes all Groundhog Day on us. After seemingly drowning to death in a lake, the mother, named Laura Price, finds herself back home, with her daughter Serena alive and well. But after Serena and her husband Tom start singing happy birthday to her, she realizes she's lived this day before.
It's a gimmick that has been done to death, especially in recent years, and especially on streaming services (examples that come to mind include Russian Doll and Palm Springs). This show's gimmick really isn't different in concept, but its premise is more in line with ideas from movies like Terminator, where it's more about fate and knowing (and trying to avoid) the end destination, as opposed to Groundhog Dog, which requires a learned lesson from the character. First of all, Laura experiences (I would say "envisions," but it entailed more than that) the future only once, not repeatedly. Secondly, she doesn't experience it alone. A guy named Nico also was given the opportunity to peer into the future before getting zapped back into the present. The amount of time they "relive" is only eight days, but it's more than enough time to uncover why they were chosen and what their connection is.
And boy, was there a huge connection. Nico's family's connections with Laura's husband go back many years; Tom was the one who sentenced Nico's brother to prison, and now he's been given the death penalty. Early in the show, Nico and Laura help each other out while trying to prevent the aforementioned serial killer's murders of these women, but after they start cracking the larger case at hand, they soon realize they both need different things and need to take different paths to get there. The writing cleverly dovetails Serena's abduction (despite all their hard work, they end up in the same situation) with Nico trying to free his brother, which sets up incredibly tense decisions and confrontations between the two. Though the writing was clunky in a lot of ways leading up to that moment (more on that in a bit), the storytelling incredibly justifies both Laura's and Nico's situations; as someone just watching, you can't find a way to root for one over the other, and you really don't even want to pick sides. You just sympathize with both. They experience a lot of emotional traumas (including Tom's affair that devastates Laura), and they really can't turn to anyone but each other since they're the only ones in their situation in the first place. It's a fascinating, revelatory moment that pays off earlier investments in the characters in ways I didn't particularly see coming.
The final few episodes, of course, shed some light on another case involving Nico's brother years ago that's magically discovered at the most convenient time and happens to be relevant, and we are given hope of a different outcome. Without truly giving away the ending, I will say that there isn't nearly the time to invest in another new character or this final story arc to make us care the same way we do about Nico and Laura, which really cheapened the experience to some extent. The ending was satisfactory, but it definitely plateaued my interest.
The clunky parts of the storytelling burst through the show's seams rather obtrusively, both in the dialogue and in the actors' delivery. Maybe once or twice per episode, Nico and Laura would sit together to discuss what they know, the clues they've discovered, and what they should do next. It was simply the writers' way of dumping exposition to make sure the audience is caught up on what's going on. First of all, there are better, more natural-sounding ways to do that. Secondly, the show's pacing was too quick at times - particularly during major events of the story - which is why the writers probably felt the need to give us "recaps" mid-episode, anyway. I've never seen a show so hand-holdy while still placing a ton of expectations on the audience to make connections at the same time (what's the writing equivalent for whiplash?). There was a lot to follow, and between the frustrating sound mixing (we had to rewind and put on subtitles two or three times almost every episode) and the uneven filming/lighting, it was actually a challenge to concentrate at times (I'm sure I'm slower at picking up things than most of you, so these may not be as big an issue for you).
I will add that the sci-fi element of the show - Laura and Nico knowing their immediate future through a vision (or whatever you want to call it) - felt at times more like a disservice to the rest of the story. The characters eventually pass the point where they know what's going to happen, yet fate strikes again in a different way to make things play out very similarly, so it didn't seem to matter. Sure, there are some cool interactions with other characters. At one point, Laura and Nico are so good at preparing to catch the serial killer (since they figure out where he's going to be) that they start to look guilty for stalking him and have no rational explanation for how they knew where to be. And sure, there's some message in there about how mistakes or cover-ups from the past always find you out. Heck, that's Biblical: Luke 2:2 says "For there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; nothing hidden that shall not be known." But for the most part, the whole seeing-the-future trick merely felt like a vehicle to allow a complex story to move forward instead of something more substantive. I wish the writers of Law & Order had a crack at this story. They could've found a way to tell it as a normal investigation story without the unnecessary sci-fi wrinkle thrown in.
Despite that, I still enjoyed the show. My wife and I were discussing theories during or after each episode, and each new discovery (there were a lot of them, which kept the story feeling fresh, at least) only made us wonder what else could be coming. Though the ending eluded us, it wasn't because we weren't shrewd enough detectives, but rather because the story added random characters in the final hours that took us down the off-beat path, which took the wind out of our sails a bit.
Notes
-Like the phrase "No fate but what we make" in Terminator, Somewhere Between even had its own catch phrase - "For one to live, another must die."
-Most of the cast's acting was quite uneven throughout, but Paula Patton, who played Laura, impressed me the most. She did better in the action scenes, which shouldn't be surprising; she played in a Mission Impossible movie recently.
-The title of the show is incredibly dumb and generic.
-The show seemed to be written as if it was for TV, with terribly cliched cliffhangers that cut to black before the action picks up from a different camera angle, as if going to and coming from commercial breaks. I suspect it was a show on TV originally. A quick google search also tells me that the show will not have another season, which is probably for the best.