Sirens review: An anaemic White Lotus cover that hits the right notes but has no tune of its own

Succession and White Lotus have a lot to answer for. Just as Game of Thrones unleashed a wave of deeply wonky fantasy shows (hitting rock bottom with the hobbit-breaking Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), so these separated-at-birth caricatures of the rich and their idiocy have unleashed a wave of cheap and cheesy copycats.

That unfortunate trend continues with the underwhelming Sirens (Netflix), in which Julianne Moore and Kevin Bacon play billionaires so detached from reality as to inhabit a different plane of existence. Theirs is a world where pet birds receive elaborate funerals, carbs are banished and staff have signed an NDA forbidding them from mentioning their bosses by name.

As the minted Kiki, Moore riffs shamelessly off the performance in White Lotus of Jennifer Coolidge, who has set the high watermark for privilege and obliviousness. But it’s a one-note turn by an actor whose best parts contain multitudes. While it is obvious from the outset that Kiki’s veneer of uber-wealth contains all sorts of cracks, she never feels like a real person – just a spreadsheet of gazillionaire hippy-dippy isms.

Bacon, who turns up later in the five-part series as Kiki‘s hedge fund manager husband, is better insofar as he’s essentially just playing Kevin Bacon – a role he invariably nails.

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The other White Lotus connection is the presence of Meghann Fahy from season two of the HBO show. Here, she plays Devon, a working stiff who makes up falafel by day and cares for her dementia-suffering father by night. At least she does until she receives an edible bouquet from semi-estranged sister Simone and immediately hightails it to her sibling’s place of employment – ie Kiki’s marvellous mansion.

Sirens exists in a heightened reality, where Devon’s need for connection sees her sleeping with two men on her first day at Kiki’s Long Island estate. She is also able to leave her father high and dry without feeling a jot of remorse. Instead, the person expected to feel guilty is Simone, aka Kiki’s loyal PA – played with a satisfying streak of ferocity by House of the Dragon’s Milly Alcott.

But once Devon turns up unannounced at Chateau Kiki, it’s straight into Eat the Rich panto. Kiki’s neighbour, Ethan Corbin III (Glen Howerton), is a self-regarding toff whose jacket is covered in duck motifs. Labor Day weekend celebrations begin with Kiki and her friends reciting a self-help mantra in the fashion of cult members (recalling Nicole Kidman’s dire Nine Perfect Strangers). Smoothie of the day is “black cherry cold press with sea kelp and tarragon”.

There are some twists sprinkled through the clumsy commentary. Down-on-her-luck Devon soon discovers she isn’t the only prisoner to their circumstances. But while the mega-wealthy are no doubt as ghastly as Sirens would have us believe, they are depicted, in White Lotus/Succession fashion, as glib idiots rather than as bloodthirsty sharks who’d eat us all up without a thought.

Sirens is co-produced by Margot Robbie and adapted by Molly Smith Metzler from her 2011 play Elemeno Pea. Metzler has suggested that the series is a reinterpretation of the Greek myth of the Sirens, banshee-like monsters who would lure sailors to their deaths with their irresistible music.

The big idea is that, in Kiki, Devon and Simone, we are experiencing the story from the perspective of the Sirens. After decades of being depicted as foul temptresses, finally they are given a voice. It’s an engaging premise, and perhaps that is the show Metzler should have made rather than an anaemic White Lotus cover version that hits all the right notes but never finds a tune to call its own.