Ryan Murphy’s The Watcher is working on Netflix only because of Noma Dumezwen’s Theodora Birch

observer This, ah, watch. As with Ryan Murphy, the new Netflix drama is a show running at the highest frequency of all times. Perhaps this is necessary, given that the premise plucked from the headlines is puzzling, if shabby: After moving into an expensive house on the outskirts of Jersey, the family begins receiving letters from an unknown stranger. The messages become increasingly specific and frightening. The family begins to find out who the stalker is – also known as the “watchdog”. Chaos ensues. (Parts of the series are rooted in The New York Journal investigation In a similar situation, although Murphy and his colleagues. run amok imagining a lot of it.)

(warning: future spoilers observer.)

observer He deviates from being “too much” at all times. Every action, reaction, and inaction is escalated to a terrible level: the family’s teenage daughter has a crush on a boy who ends up destroying her father’s reputation on TikTok. The annoying couple next door continues their gardening in the family yard, then they die, but are actually alive, but then one of them dies anyway. Somehow the local police chief has the power to tell the entire FBI to ignore the family’s distress calls.

thanks God observer He has an elegant, impatient saint looking for him – his own watcher, if you will. As ridiculous as Private Detective Theodora Birch (Numa Dumizuni) seems at first, she becomes observersaving grace. It is the only heart that has a normal BPM in a presentation where everyone’s heartbeat is very fast.

After his family begins receiving anonymous threatening messages, Dean Brannock (Bobby Cannavale) seeks Theodora’s help, on the recommendation of the police department. (Obviously, she has a reputation for researching these kinds of weird cases.) When Dean meets Theodora at the beginning of Episode 2, she immediately tells him her backstory—in one ridiculous and grotesque one-on-one dialogue.

“I was a jazz singer,” she says. But “the more I was a good musician, the more a drinker I was.” Her husband told her that she would either stop drinking or he would leave her; She chose to continue drinking. But then she had a heart attack on stage, so she went to rehab – where she became addicted to the real crime. Now she’s a detective because it’s more fun than drinking!

Dean is puzzled by this complicated story and unsure if he should trust this woman. But Theodora told him she had liver cancer and had a daughter, so she could really use the cash. (It’s a silly back story that keeps on giving, really.) Dean agrees to have her take over their case and help them figure out who The Watcher is.

Trained stage actress Domswini strikes the delicate balance of Theodora’s inherent eccentricity and the sense of charisma she needs to bring on the show. This monologue is totally touching, not just because it’s weird—Theodora says she’s literally addicted to murder—but because it sells it all. She gives a sense of tiredness and long regret when she tells us about choosing the bottle over her marriage; She admits that she is dying of cancer in a realistic way, but it is clear that she hates her grief.

Theodora is a woman who needs the Brannocks’ help as much as they need hers, and every word counts, sighs, and looks she conveys subtly. As she continues to meet both Dean and his wife, Nora (Naomi Watts), their confidence in her only grows — as does ours. How can we not trust this well-dressed dying woman, who always wears tailored jackets, beautiful hoods, and luxurious gloves? It helps that she’s the only person who takes the Brannocks seriously, and never judges them for their increased paranoia.

What Theodora does offer is a sense of perspective, a wonderful middle ground between Neighbors Brannox’s sweet stance of “The Watcher isn’t real!” Paranoia (a religion) accuses everyone he meets. Even when Theodora is wrong (and she’s on spoiler alert, she always is), it offers a logical explanation for why the suspect is the right motive to follow. When Dean utterly admires, “This guy is so eccentric, so he sure is the one who wrote the letters,” Theodora pulls him in; This guy might be weird, but she did the research, and in fact, he just had a mental illness. (observer He loves to demonize people with mental illness, but that’s for another blog.)

By separating Theodora from the rest of the melodrama, the show is overwhelmed – we only see her alongside the Brannox family, in neo-noir settings, like dinners and dimly lit back rooms – it helps observer Maintain some semblance of grounding. All the hysteria surrounding the life of the Brannox family continues to bring to a standstill, giving the show a tumultuous pace at start and stop. But when Theodora returns to the screen, there is some movement forward; Someone is already solving the mystery here in this mystery show. And this person is more believable than deceived, in the show it is mostly the latter.

When Theodora finally succumbs to her illness in the penultimate episode, it’s hard to justify more watching – the real hero is gone. The Brannocks attend both the Theodora’s hospital bed and her funeral, which appears to be the most humane throughout the entire series. But before she died, she tried to turn herself into a villain, telling Dean that she had been The Watcher the whole time. However, that turned out to be a lie: Her daughter told the Brannox family that Theodora only claimed to be The Watcher in the hope that it would give the family some closure. She didn’t want her final case to remain unresolved either.

observer It would have been better to shift his focus towards Theodora and move away from the mysterious and increasingly unbelievable supernatural main plot. There are as many wealthy whites affected on TV as it is. How many shows can boast that their best character is being a badass, crime-loving, British accent, black jazz singer turned private investigator? observer You can, and should be proud of.

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