Every streamer needs a niche, and Apple TV+ has found its as the home of deranged drama. It started with See, a maniacal postapocalyptic adventure set in a world where everybody was blind. Then came Lisey’s Story, a barking riff on Stephen King where not even its star, Julianne Moore, seemed to know what was happening.
That was followed by The Big Door Prize, a quirky tale of supernatural derangement featuring Chris O’Dowd as an Irishman marooned in a small Louisiana town losing its grip on reality. I won’t mention Shining Girls, because nobody – not even those who starred in it – remembers Shining Girls.
Now Apple TV+ arrives at the evolutionary dead end of the David Lynch-does-dramedy concept. High Desert (streaming from today) stars Patricia Arquette, who will be forever synonymous with gonzo 1990s indie cinema because of her starring role in the Quentin Tarantino-scripted True Romance. Here she plays Peggy, an addict forced to start over when the FBI raids her Los Angeles mansion while she and her husband (Matt Dillon) throw a drug party.
Several years later Peggy is working in a Wild West theme park in the scorched depths of southern California’s Yucca Valley while she comes to terms with the recent death of her mother (Bernadette Peters). But when her brother and sister (Keir O’Donnell and Christine Taylor) announce their plan to sell the family home from under her, she must take on a second job to pay the mortgage (and stop her siblings flogging the property).
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As luck would have it a private detective, Bruce (Brad Garrett), has hoodwinked one of her friends out of money, and Peggy goes to confront him. She discovers she has a knack for sleuthing, and they team up. Their first case revolves around a New Age grifter named Guru Bob (Rupert Friend), who sells stolen paintings.
Mystery of the Week dramas are staging a comeback, with the far more cogent Poker Face coming to Sky next week. But High Desert feels too frazzled to benefit from this revival. It has the surrealist flakiness of a minor Coen brothers movie or of Paul Thomas Anderson’s woozy stab at Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (or the video game Kentucky Route Zero).
As the unravelling Peggy, Arquette delivers her best impersonation of Jennifer Coolidge’s character in The White Lotus (very much an acquired taste). She gives it everything, and it’s a shame that the drama constructed around her performance never coheres. High Desert is a prestige-TV mirage: the closer you look, the less there is to see.
