Surrender to the Batshittery That Is The Watcher
Vulture and New York TV critic Jen Chaney previously worked for the Washington Post and has bylines at the New York Times and Vanity Fair. She also wrote As If: The Complete Oral History of Clueless.
Vulture and New York TV critic Jen Chaney previously worked for the Washington Post and has bylines at the New York Times and Vanity Fair. She also wrote As If: The Complete Oral History of Clueless.
Dream house or … nightmare?“It knows what scares you” was the tagline for 1982’s Poltergeist, a horror classic that doubled as a cautionary tale about the dark side of desirable suburban real estate. The Watcher, the new Netflix series created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, is also a suburban-real-estate cautionary tale that knows what scares you. More than that, though, it knows what obsesses you.
This limited series — based loosely on the story Reeves Wiedeman wrote for this magazine about a couple who bought their dream house in Westfield, New Jersey, only to be terrorized by anonymous letters from someone who creepily called themselves “The Watcher” — is subtextually a commentary on a variety of contemporary fixations. Among them: the housing market, home renovation, conspiracy theories, alcoholism, social media, and, of course, money. Murphy, Brennan, and their fellow writers and filmmakers (several of whom also worked on the duo’s extremely popular Dahmer) throw a kitchen sink of issues and true-crime tropes into these episodes, as well as a kitchen island controversially accented with butcher-block countertops. While that approach has its problems, namely an abundance of plot holes and red herrings, it makes for absorbing television, in part because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The Watcher can be over the top, but like the best of Murphy’s work, it knows it’s being over the top and often leans into its own excessiveness with a wink and a smirk. This is an addictive work of television that invites us to examine our own frivolous, sometimes dangerous addictions.
Like the true story on which it is based, The Watcher follows a married couple, Dean and Nora Brannock (Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts), as they purchase a majestically large house an hour outside of New York City at the coveted address of 657 Boulevard. Like the couple that had this experience in real life, they begin to receive letters from an anonymous writer who says they are watching the house and implies it may be haunted. The details in the letters — about the Brannocks’ children, Ellie (Isabel Gravitt) and Carter (Luke David Blumm), and the family’s behavior — become increasingly specific and disturbing. The Broadduses, the couple who actually went through this traumatic experience, never moved into 657 Boulevard. But in the Netflix version, the Brannocks, who sink literally all of their savings into the property, fully occupy the home while attempting to figure out who’s harassing them and why, an effort that, particularly for Dean, becomes all consuming.
Beyond that basic outline, Murphy and Brennan, who between them share co-writing credits on all seven episodes (Murphy also directs two), take significant liberties with the truth, which is probably for the best since the Broadduses apparently asked to make the fictional family resemble them as little as possible. Consequently, a series of events that was genuinely bizarre becomes even freakier once the writers start sprinkling in even more wild details. Ryan Murphy’s Law very much applies here: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong in the most batshit way possible. Within the context of The Watcher, I really do mean that as a compliment.
Not long after settling in and starting to refurbish their kitchen, the Brannocks establish tense relationships with several of their neighbors, including Mitch (Richard Kind) and Mo (Margo Martindale), a husband and wife who have no compunctions about coming into the Brannocks’ yard to pluck arugula. “Let’s go make the most delicious fucking salad of our entire lives,” Mo hisses in Dean’s direction after he shouts at them for trespassing in the name of lettuce collection.
Eccentric local historian Pearl Winslow (an astutely cast Mia Farrow) and her intellectually disabled brother Jasper (Terry Kinney) also have a tendency to pop up unannounced, sometimes even in the house’s dumbwaiter. The people that Nora and Dean turn to for help — an arrogant, unmotivated local police detective (Christopher McDonald); a young security specialist named Dakota (Henry Hunter Hall), who takes an interest in Ellie; and friend/real-estate agent Karen Calhoun (Jennifer Coolidge) — offer only modest help. They have better luck once they hire Theodora Birch (an authoritative Noma Dumezweni), a private investigator more willing to follow leads than the cops. But that “better luck” propels Dean down a rabbit hole of paranoia and mad theorizing, jeopardizing his marriage and his career while turning everyone in the Brannocks’ orbit into a potential suspect.
How easy it is to get sucked into true crime, whether it involves you personally or is something you’re consuming as content — this is a dynamic that The Watcher understands well. This show shouts out every cockamamie possible explanation for those letters with the deranged glee of someone who just snorted a mountain of Adderall, watched every episode of the original The Staircase as well as the scripted version of The Staircase, and is extremely eager to share their many thoughts about the owl theory. Watching The Watcher is undeniably a rush, so much so that even when certain plot twists don’t make sense — and trust me that many of them do not — it doesn’t even matter. Forget about logic, just give us another hit of the sweet, preposterous idea that there’s an underground blood cult terrorizing Bobby Cannavale.
It helps, too, that the cast is so fully committed. Cannavale and Watts are not shy about leaning into their characters’ less attractive qualities. Nora’s a bit of a social climber, while Dean is impulsive and not always honest, which bolsters the notion that we should be wary of everyone in this auspicious Jersey Zip Code. Coolidge makes sure that Karen really lives up to her name — “We’re not ready yet,” she tells a server at the local country club, “and my napkin smells like vinegar” — and infuses her with a wonderfully odd combination of real-estate agent chipperness and Debbie Downer bluntness. “I don’t want to bum you out,” she tells Nora at one point with utter sincerity, “but I don’t think Dean’s going to be employed much longer.”
Then there’s Farrow, the onetime Rosemary’s Baby star who seems to be having a ball as Pearl, the kind of busybody chatterbox who quickly becomes your worst nightmare if she engages you in conversation. She regularly delivers hilarious lines — “Butcher-block countertops? Are you turning your house into a delicatessen?” she squawks at Dean — with a perfectly measured deadpan that makes it clear Pearl has no idea how strangely she comes across. The Watcher’s evocation of classic horror doesn’t end with Farrow’s presence, either. The desaturated color palette and piano-centered score composed by Morgan Kibby and David Klotz, and some of the story beats, are reminiscent of not only Rosemary’s Baby but also ’70s scare fare like The Omen, The Exorcist, and John Carpenter’s original Halloween. Unlike Dahmer or much of American Horror Story, this Murphy project doesn’t overdo it with the gore. This is a work of psychological horror, pretty much full stop.
Murphy & Co. couple that vibe with an obvious desire to capture the zeitgeist of the COVID era. Many of the societal concerns that have taken center stage since the pandemic began — cancel culture, QAnon, religious extremism, the sense that danger cannot be escaped even in supposed safe spaces like one’s own home — are aggressively nodded to here. The longer you watch The Watcher, the more you start to feel like Dean, untethered, like you’re living in a world that has become completely cockeyed. Yes, there is a long list of quibbles and questions that can legitimately be raised about just about everything that happens in this series. But that also feels weirdly appropriate. The Watcher is a series about how it feels when nothing makes sense anymore. Regardless of where you live, we’ve all been there.
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the October 24, 2022, issue of New York Magazine.
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