Actors in the streaming era rarely give us a chance to miss them. Nicole Kidman has a show out every few months and still never stops making movies. Samuel L. Jackson’s IMDb page lists five film credits this year, on top of his role in the new Peacock docudrama Fight Night. Which makes the restraint of a performer like Billy Crystal feel kind of refreshing. Voice acting and guest gigs aside, Crystal has been off the small screen since 2015, when FX canceled his and Josh Gad’s showbiz sendup The Comedians after a single limp season. (Nine years later, the unstreamable comedy has been fully memory-holed.) It’s enough to make his return to television, as executive producer and star of the Apple TV+ thriller Before, feel like an event.
With anticipation for its Oct. 25 premiere swirling, I’m sad to say that while it probably isn’t the very worst show of 2024, Before could be the year’s biggest disappointment. Created by Sarah Thorp (of A&E’s short-lived 2016 The Omen spin-off Damien), who credits Crystal with dreaming up its premise, the series fails on just about every level. It’s emotionally shallow and, stretched across 10 repetitive episodes, chronically boring—a psychological thriller that offers neither psychological insight nor thrills. The story is at once familiar and ridiculous. The dialogue is a string of clichés. Despite a quality cast, the acting is so universally stiff that poor direction must be to blame. Many scenes that were presumably supposed to be tense and terrifying, of tortured characters losing their minds over some supernatural provocation or other, had me cracking up. It’s the most egregious example of Apple’s weakness for overindulging ill-conceived celebrity vehicles since the service launched with the dire, post-apocalyptic Jason Momoa vehicle See.
The plot unfolds like a sanitized take on Jonathan Glazer’s haunting 2004 drama of grief and guilt, Birth, embellished with gimmicky twists that recall early M. Night Shyamalan. Crystal plays Dr. Eli Adler, a child psychiatrist mourning the recent death of his cancer-stricken wife, Lynn (Judith Light, wasted). Sometimes he sees her, ghosting around their home, or perhaps just in his imagination; either way, she’s still very much a presence in his life. One morning, he hears a noise outside and opens his front door to find a little boy (Jacobi Jupe) whose fingers are bloody from scratching paint off the door frame. Conscientious mental health professional that he is, Eli tries to help the unnervingly silent child, but he runs away. At night, the boy turns up in Eli’s bedroom, and the older man follows him back to the apartment of his exhausted guardian, Denise (Rosie Perez). The next day, he’s approached to treat a troubled eight-year-old in the foster-care system. It turns out to be, you guessed it, the very same boy. His name is Noah.
As Eli works with Noah, whose hallucinations of inky water leaking through ceilings and creepy, worm-like creatures make him lash out violently, it becomes apparent that the boy’s appearance on his doorstep was no coincidence. Their lives overlap. Or, as Eli puts it in one of the show’s many accidentally funny outbursts: “We’re connected. We’re connected!” Eli has had disturbing visions of his own. (Before never tires of showing us something gory, then—gotcha!—revealing it was all a dream.) There’s a photo of an old farmhouse on Eli’s refrigerator, and he’s not sure how it got there. Noah, a precocious artist, has sketched the exact same building. And it all seems to have something to do with Lynn, who wrote and illustrated picture books.
The show gets into a rhythm of horror feints and fainting spells, with Eli and his increasingly concerned colleague Jane (an underutilized Hope Davis) tossing around terms like conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness and radical exposure therapy as though scientific jargon could redeem a plot that just keeps getting goofier. In a similar vein, Eli picks a fight with a clergyman: “I believe in facts. You believe in fairy tales created to keep people from facing the truth.” But the science vs. spirituality debate barely gets started. Before doesn’t seem to know what it’s supposed to be about, aside from the obvious but incessantly repeated idea that trauma warps people. “Trauma is a vortex,” Eli says. “It sucks us in and holds us trapped. It’s almost as if we belong to it.” It’s as though Crystal and Thorp think they’ve invented—rather than recycled for the millionth time—a storytelling crutch so creaky it has a name: the trauma plot.
One useful, if trite, function of trauma in fiction is to give characters depth. So it’s doubly disappointing that Before doesn’t even manage to use the trope effectively to that end. Noah has no personality or backstory to speak of. Denise exists solely to fret over Noah. Jane is here to mark how far Eli eventually strays from the norms of his profession. Even Eli is a cipher; the show gives little sense of what he was like before Lynn’s death plunged him into the doldrums of grief. An aggrieved adult daughter (Maria Dizzia) alludes to his history of prioritizing his work over his family, but that detail leads nowhere. A subplot in which an officious real estate agent (Miriam Shor) prepares to sell Eli’s home is fully inane. The best stories flow organically from their characters; here, those characters are nothing more than pawns in a clumsy allegory.
It would be shocking to see Apple release such an incompetent show if Before didn’t epitomize the company’s streaming M.O. Flush with iPhone cash and new to the TV business, Apple evidently offers carte blanche to A-listers pitching passion projects. Sometimes that strategy pays off, as in the timely tech thriller Severance, shepherded by director and executive producer Ben Stiller, with a cast that includes Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Christopher Walken, and John Turturro. But at least as often, it yields shows that sound great on paper but turn out bland (Truth Be Told) or silly (The Morning Show), portentous (The New Look) or pretentious (Mr. Corman). With Hollywood in the grips of austerity, it’s a relief to have a streamer that is still willing to invest in talent. Now, if only Apple would vet the ideas attached to those big names
