Apple TV Plus’ ‘Roar’ Series Review
Roar, already available on Apple TV Plus, comes to us from GLOW‘s Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, and is an adaptation of Cecelia Ahern’s novel of the same name. The cast includes a long stream of award-winning actors and actresses, who give very strong performances overall.
We have been very privileged to watch all episodes in advance, so thanks to Apple TV Plus for that opportunity. Let us now discuss the show.
The anthology series is a compilation of eight different stories that aim to tell the real-life struggles of being a woman today, through the use of dark comedy and some fantastical elements, including magical realism at times. Nicole Kidman, for instance, who stars in one of the episodes and is an executive producer on the series, struggles to keep the memory of her family alive. After his father passes away, her mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and her eldest son is moving out of the house to live with his girlfriend. Kidman’s character is worried about this transitional period in her life, in which she will stop being both a daughter and a mother.
However, she has the ability to travel back in time for a few seconds to relive her memories when she eats a photograph that depicted those moments. So, in the middle of an episode in which she is trying to connect with her mother before she forgets about her, Kidman will suddenly start digesting a photograph. And while on paper that may have seemed very funny, it’s not filmed as a comedy bit or something we should be surprised by (even though we are, and there will inevitably be many memes about this in a few weeks) — it’s the show’s dark comedic touches, which work most of the time.
Perhaps the biggest example of a dark comedy episode is the third one, titled The Woman Who Was Kept on a Shelf, starring Betty Gilpin as a literal trophy wife. Indeed, her husband, played by Daniel Dae Kim, builds a shelf for her in their house and tells her she no longer has to worry about work. She can sit there, where her husband can see her while he works, and all will be fine.
Now, not all the episodes are on the same level of enjoyment, but the struggles they present are very real, and I connected with them most of the time, even though I am a white man who does not know the first thing about being a woman today. I would say my favorite was an episode titled The Woman Who Solved Her Won Murder, starring none other than Alison Brie (by far one of the most underappreciated actresses working today if you ask me), who walks us through the struggles of a far-from-perfect woman who was found dead in the woods. Brie comes back as a ghost to solve her own murder. And if that premise sounds awesome, believe me, the episode lives up to it.
The series does a wonderful job of conveying women’s struggles, but instead of beating you over the head with them, they always find an alternate way of explaining them. And I would say that the best thing about it is that not all of them have women as heroes, but simply rather layered characters. Another element that was very well-portrayed in the series is that women are expected to be perfect, not make mistakes. While men can make as many mistakes as they want, and we’ll brush them off, if a woman steps out of line, she is doomed.
Apple TV Plus showed a lot of confidence and courage with this series, because the stuff the creators pulled off is out of the ordinary. There’s an episode in Roar, titled The Woman Who Was Fed by a Duck, in which a woman, played by Merritt Wever, dates an actual duck who she can hear. The story quickly unfolds as a toxic relationship (very obvious) metaphor, and while it wasn’t the best episode, having a duck play a possessive boyfriend definitely felt refreshing and kept me watching.
The biggest plus of the series is that it effortlessly managed to portray important issues for women, and it’s not just about being ignored (which they do cover in the first episode, The Woman Who Disappeared) or being abused, but also about motherhood (portrayed in an episode starring Cynthia Erivo titled The Woman Who Found Bite Marks on her Skin), living with the same husband for over thirty years (an episode titled The Woman Who Returned Her Husband), or even losing touch with her family, like in Kidman’s episode described above.
The biggest downside for me was, besides some episodes that were hard to get through (including the first two acts of Kidman’s episode, which was probably the one I was looking forward to the most), that I am not the biggest fan of anthology series. I prefer the classic one-season storyline, even though I understand the many advantages of anthologies. The episodes are no longer than 30-35 minutes, and if you are interested in a dark comedy about women’s issues, you can definitely put a couple of them on before going to bed, and you won’t have to worry about remembering what happened in the first chapter once you get to the last one.
Since I binge-watched the series, I felt the weight the format carries more than if I had watched them on separate days. I would say this, though: I would be in for another show from the same creators, featuring ideally all of the cast (but I’d be happy with just half), about women’s struggles, although with a more traditional format.
The long line of actors that worked on the show includes Issa Rae, Nicole Kidman, Betty Gilpin, Daniel Dae Kim, Cynthia Erivo, Jake Johnson, Merritt Wever, Alison Brie, Chris Lowell, Meera Syal, Bernard White, and Alfred Molina, among many others. As a sidenote, and this has nothing to do with the show’s quality, I was constantly enjoying myself because of all the reunions that happened between actors in the show. For instance, GLOW stars Betty Gilpin and Alison Brie have lead roles in the series, New Girl‘s Jake Johnson and Merritt Wever also pop up, as well as Chris Lowell and Alfred Molina, from Promising Young Woman. And I’m sure there’s a bunch of other pairs I didn’t immediately pick up on. That part was really fun to keep track of.
Thank you to Apple TV Plus for letting us watch all eight episodes in advance. Roar is now streaming.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
