A Review of ‘The Undoing’: Provocative but Largely Disappointing
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I admit the HBO miniseries The Undoing had my ears perked up long before it aired. Throw Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant into a soapy whodunnit. Sold!
It’s true that The Undoing was poised for T.V success. A deco-elegant Manhattan backdrop, a circle jerk of upper crust private school moms, a son with a overpriced education (Henry), one career mom (Sylvia Steinetz), an outcast mom (Elena Alveres), a handsome doctor husband who’s not around much (Jonathan Fraser), and a very invested billionaire Grandfather (Franklin Renner)- and there you have it- as unoriginal of a formula as it is, admittedly- real T.V bait — at least on paper.
The Undoing serves up the patina of glamour and privilege it promises, cracking open high society’s filigreed pretense. And for someone who loved Gossip Girl and has been itching for a similar operatic drama of uptown secrets and juicy scandals, the storyline sold me instantly. I mean everyone knows-the tea is scolding hot uptown. I mean scolding.
So yeah, The Undoing had potential. However, going beyond the surface glamour and covetable mis en scene, into the crux of what really and truly makes a strong television series, The Undoing failed to deliver.
A Wannabe Big Little Lies
My first obvious impression of the show, one shared by a lot of viewers, was that The Undoing had way too many shades of Big Little Lies (BLL). Copy-and-paste.
First of all, Grace Fraser (Nicole Kidman) takes on the same exact broken archetype as BLL’s Celeste Wright (also Nicole Kidman).
Just- like- BLL’s Celeste, Grace Fraser is glassy eyed, beautifully broken, and somewhat pollyannaish in the face of obvious red flags. In the same vein, both Grace and Celeste tussle between self deception and truth, in face of their husband’s underhanded manipulation.
And then there are the hazy murder flashbacks that are weirdly reminiscent of those in Big Little Lies. But at least in BLL the flashbacks were chillingly elegant and well timed. The flashbacks in The Undoing are randomly placed and serve little purpose if any.
I gotta say- if Big Little Lies was the standard that The Undoing was shooting for it was a total misfire. The Undoing doesn’t even come close to the sort of caliber of well rounded cinematic elements that made Big Little Lies such a strong series. Not to mention, The Undoing’s disappointing ending only serves to amplify the series’ desperate emulation.
This all just goes to show just how high the bar Big Little Lies managed to set. The Monterey five put on an act thats going to be very hard for Hollywood to follow.
A Weak Finale
To a lot of viewers, The Undoing’s finale held out hope of a shocking twist, especially since episodes four and five turned out to be pretty boring. Instead, the finale only solidified just how excruciatingly meandering and redundant the series’ really was, and all amounting to an underwhelming tin pot revelation that had most of us going “Really is that it?”.
Turns out The Undoing had us dizzy with speculation for nothing. HBO really did reel us in, dangling a million potential plot twists and red herrings in our faces, letting us twist in the wind-all to pull the wool out from under our eyes, with a “It was Jonathan the whole time! Gotcha!”.
“Ok. seriously?”
I guess we haven’t learned our lesson from the Game of Thrones finale, that Reddit theories can only inflate our expectations. But to r/TheUndoing’s defense, the series could have gone in so many interesting directions, but it didn’t! Why didn’t it? Because that would’ve defeated what the series was really trying to get at all along- that You Should Have Known. Whatever.
Boiling it all down, The Undoing’s point is very Jekyl and Hyde, nodding to the masquerades in high society where villains are disguised and exalted as philanthropists, city patrons, and in Jonathan Fraser’s case- a doctor saint. The Undoing speaks to the duplicity of our most intimate companion’s and to the delusion that feeds our blind loyalty to them.
The underlying moral lesson: reality is the illusion that you want it to be, until the truth bleeds. We see what we want to see in the people we love.
Really Shallow Character Development and Way Too Many Loose Ends
The Undoing’s finale left me with way too many questions about the characters, which speaks to another weak point in The Undoing- extremely hollow character development.
Undoubtedly, the series was rich with provocation but David Kelley and Susanne Bier could have gone much further in peeling back the layers of each character, especially Jonathan’s. They could have lengthened Jonathan’s arc much further, delving deeper into Jonathan’s past. Instead we’re all left with so many questions about Jonathan.
Was Jonathan’s little sister Katie even hit by a car or did Jonathan kill her? I thought maybe they’d do a flashback and show what really happened that night, but they didn’t.
Who was the other woman Jonathan had an affair with, before Elena? Fitzgerald could have done some digging there.
Just a few of the million and one questions I still have.
Favorite Characters: Haley Fitzgerald and Hugh Grant
All disappointments aside, The Undoing delivered some pretty strong acting, but everyone’s talking about one actress in particular, and that’s Noma Dumezweni who stars as Jonathan’s lawyer- Haley Fitzgerald.
From an acting perspective, Dumezweni was the obvious jewel of the show, so much that Twitter fans are demanding a Fitzgerald spinoff. Personally, I saw A LOT of DNA strands from How to Get Away With Murder’s Annalise Keating in Fitzgerald’s character. Like Keating, Fitzgerald is byronic and has a strong tunnel vision for winning her case- her winning line, “People hire me to create Muck.”
Fitzgerald is less interested in moral rectitude and Jonathan’s culpability as she is in driving her case home and doing whatever it takes to get there.
I would love to see Fitzgerald lead in a soapy law series that satirizes the dumb and rich.
Hugh Grant’s performance takes the silver medal, his charm just as potent as it was ten years ago (the man doesn’t age).
Grant pretty much just played himself, charismatic to the T, British to the T, and so charming that he managed to fool us all.
Grant tells The Times “People…say, ‘Not the guy from Notting Hill! Not the guy from Love Actually! He can’t swing a hammer 14'”.
Honestly, it really just didn’t seem like he had it in him. The only subtle tell tale for me that pointed to Jonathan as the killer (other than his mother’s vouch for his sociopathy at the very end lol) was when he bit, yes bit- an inmate during one of the jail scenes early in the show.
But I let him off the hook, because, I mean its Hugh Grant. Look at him!
I cant lie, even with all the series’ disappointments The Undoing was compelling enough for me to enjoy most of it. I recommend it with caution because it’s no Big Little Lies. But-it’s entertaining enough, not to mention everyones talking about it, apparently even Travis Scott.
If The Undoing retains any fame it will owe to its stellar cast. But we should never conflate great actors with great T.V. And regardless of how entertaining the show ended up being, I’ll always remember how tantalized and bitterly unsatisfied the finale left me feeling.
Also, who the ****runs a hammer through a dishwasher?
