Big Sky review – David E Kelley and Disney deliver derivative dross

“You were the one who said don’t get attached, that you keep your feelings in a jar, inside a locked drawer! Your words!”

And yet you think – are they? Are these really anybody’s words? Has anybody actually ever said such a thing in the annals of human history? And if so, did anybody within hearing keep a straight face and/or stay the hand that could rightfully have felled them for such an utterance in the heat of a pseudo-marital row?

And here, in an inscribed nutshell, we have one of the main problems with David E Kelley’s drama Big Sky, streaming on Star, the new grownup channel from Disney+. The script is woeful. Woeful. He does this sometimes. For all the precision-tooled efficiency of LA Law (ask your great-grandparents, children. Get them to explain Harry Hamlin while you’re there. He was a rubber man who came to life in Mad Men), the quick distillation of headline issues into plots for Ally McBeal and the shining rigour of Big Little Lies, there is The Practice drowning in its own lather, later Ally McBeal (totally bonkers) and the second series of Big Little Lies (an engine of disappointment). Kelley’s quality control is unreliable. And sometimes, alas, the result is a series in which people have to partake in exchanges such as: “The silence scares me”/“I know what you mean.”

Ah well. Even Homer nods. This time he is doing so over the tale of a private investigation firm in Helena, Montana, run by Cassie Dewell (Kylie Bunbury) and Cody Hoyt (Ryan Philippe, whose strange, pupil-less eyes remain the most disconcerting in the business). They have recently started sleeping together. It is not clear why, because as characters they are mere ciphers, and as actors they are not together long enough for us to sense any chemistry. Cody does appear to live in a hobbit house, for some reason, so maybe he stirs some architectural interest in Cassie. Thanks to a later twist in the pilot episode, we may never know. Regardless, Cody’s semi-estranged wife, a former police detective and not-incidentally Cassie’s best friend, Jenny (Katheryn Winnick), is furious about this marital and gal-pal violation (she even goes right up to Cassie’s face at the end of what I think is meant to be a withering diatribe and says “WOW!” right in it, so – you know – wow indeed). Everyone stands around looking sorrowful and apprehensive as appropriate. It is very boring. Then, something finally happens – two teenage girls go missing and the team soon become embroiled in a sex-trafficking mystery.

And here we come to the true problem with Big Sky, which is that it is far more interested in the scenes involving the whimpering vulnerability of the two kidnapped teens (Natalie Alyn Lind as Danielle and Jade Pettyjohn as her younger sister Grace) and sex worker Jerrie (played by non-binary actor Jesse James Keitel), and the creeping sadism of their captor Ronald (Brian Geraghty) and his boss, than it is in anything else.

I am choosing not to reveal the boss’s identity as the episode’s twist around that is the only reason to watch – although, as it also inspires a hope that the series is about to swerve into darker, more complex waters, perhaps I should. It was a hope that – especially after working on such female-led (before and behind the camera, thanks to the involvement of Reese Witherspoon’s production company) projects such as Big Little Lies – Kelley would find something else to do with the three abductees than have them Tased, shot with arrows and dragged back after every useless escape attempt. I hoped there wouldn’t be showers taken in front of their kidnapper (and having the showerer be trans does not make it progressive or lessen the exploitative vibe in any way). I didn’t even think to hope that they would not turn to close harmony singing as a way to bond with each other and try to reach the human core of their captor, but it turns out, in episode three, that I should have been hoping for that the hardest.

There is nothing wrong with trash. But this is just bad TV. Regressive, derivative, horribly written, filled with one-dimensional characters (Jenny’s son, for example, can barely be said to exist) and clearly made by someone unable to imagine that what is on screen might be harrowing rather than entertaining to great portions of its intended audience. What, really, can you say when someone commits something so barely and contemptuously imagined but – wow.