Are monsters born, or are they made?
That is the prevailing question guiding Sirens, Netflix’s glamorous limited series that wears the vibes of primetime soaps like Desperate Housewives, Dirty Sexy Money, and Revenge to at least nibble at the rich and ruthless. The territory is well-worn, but there is an undeniable thrill in seeing wealthy people in ball gowns dance around their perfectly tailored hems, only to trip and fall over their worst impulses. When done right, these series are riotous romps that can sometimes surprise with their profundity and pathos, allowing us to empathize with characters who are as far removed from our circumstances as humanly possible.
Sirens’ plot
Sirens starts on the right high heel, throwing us smack dab into the fractured world of Devon DeWitt (Meghann Fahy), a Buffalo native who stumbles out of the local police station after a night in jail. She sends an SOS message to her estranged sister Simone (Milly Alcock). Still, her only reply comes in the form of an Edible Arrangement delivered to the home Devon shares with their dementia-suffering father, Bruce (Bill Camp). Furious, Devon travels 17 hours to confront her sister at work. Simone’s work is as the personal assistant to Michaela “Kiki” Kell (Julianne Moore), the second wife of wealthy hedge fund manager Peter Kell (Kevin Bacon). Simone has made it her life’s mission to serve Kiki and her every whim, from helping her draft a sext to tossing out Kiki’s smoothie because she’s “off ginger this week.”
The review
Devon is understandably disturbed by Simone’s job and the changes spurred in her, including lying about her complicated past and cosmetic changes like tattoo removal and a nose job. Her fears are further bolstered when she gets a glimpse into Kiki’s world of idle rich wildlife preservation, which looks and sounds like a cult. (Kiki wields a bird-themed staff and has the guests at her fundraiser recite a New Age-adjacent poem.) As she has done most of her life, Devon decides to rescue Simone from Kiki’s web by infiltrating her circle of pastel-colored couture and robotic face marks and exposing its nefariousness before it’s too late.
The series is at its best when it dissects and embraces the public and hidden absurdities of Kiki’s avian-influenced universe. The snappy first episode excellently establishes how Simone manages Kiki’s organized chaos while pissing off the support staff at every possible turn. That tension yields some of the series’ strongest comedic moments, grounded in Simone’s earnestness and fear of failing Kiki, and the staff’s begrudging acknowledgment that their world is weird. Showrunner Molly Smith Metzler makes that weirdness plain, through Devon as an audience surrogate and amusing dialogue, but also understands that Sirens’ success hinges on the characters taking it all way too seriously. The winks at the audience are an effective counterbalance to the shenanigans on display, from Devon being chased after three potential suitors to a peregrine falcon braining itself on Kiki’s bedroom window.
Where Sirens starts tripping up is in its attempts to over-dimensionalize its characters. The DeWitt family has a past marred by mental health tragedies, child abuse and neglect, and yearslong estrangement, which certainly explains why Simone would want to rebrand herself by way of Kiki. However, the series struggles to examine those motivations within the context of its campy set dressings. The barrel roll momentum comes to screeching halts whenever Kiki and Devon are forced to confront their pasts and what led them to the Kell estate. There are a few times when the tragedy and comedy are well-aligned, like when Devon and Simone fight in Simone’s suite and Devon demands to know if Simone is still taking her anxiety medication. However, the drama often eats up the humor, which leads to alienating tonal confusion and a decidedly less interesting experience.
As the series starts wrapping up, it becomes clear that every principal character has some difficult backstory that explains their worst impulses. Peter is just an older man whose second marriage has alienated him from his children. Ethan Corbin III (a charmingly pathetic Glenn Howerton) is just a himbo experiencing true-blue love for the first time. Bruce (Bill Camp) was just frozen in grief over the loss of his wife, which led him to neglect Simone so badly that she was forced into the foster care system. And then there’s Kiki, a woman whose wildly compelling shifts from affluent aloofness to shrewd calculation is cited as a consequence of her fertility problems with Peter. In vacuums, these are interesting and even rich character motivations. Together, they feel like the series is flattening their characters’ agency to just trauma, which, ironically, reads as one-dimensional for a purported black comedy.
The cast deserves significant credit for the tonal inconsistencies not derailing the series. They have a firm grasp of the material and their characters, keeping us engaged, even in the ebbs. Meghann Fahy is brilliant as Devon, tearing through the gauzy artifice of the Kell grounds with aplomb while letting the fragility and inherent goodness underneath her rough exterior slip through. Milly Alcock is equally strong, doing the exact opposite. Her wide eyes brim with excitement and terror, keenly aware that she is overdue for an epic crash out. She is adept at the hellcat assistant humor and the heavier dramatic material involving Simone’s childhood. Julianne Moore can play manipulative motherly figures in her sleep at this point (justice for May December), but she still finds elements of surprise as Kiki, especially in how seamlessly she transitions from faux warmth to exacting coldness.
Is Sirens worth watching?
In the end, Sirens offers a perfectly reasonable answer to the question about the nature of monsters. That warrants another question: do we want perfectly reasonable answers from a series featuring a woman swimming from a late-night yacht hookup to rescue her sister from a falcon’s kamikaze attack on a window? No, because primetime soaps thrive on dialing everything to the max and relishing in the shamelessness. While it ultimately evades the fatal pratfalls of other primetime soap failures (like the dismal 2021 Gossip Girl reboot), Sirens does ring the alarm on the follies of pursuing explicit empathy instead of letting it come naturally through compelling characters and heightened chaos.
Sirens will stream on Netflix beginning May 22, 2025.
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