A teenager sits across from a private investigator and says he needs to find his mother, even though, by everyone’s account but his own, his mother is at home and perfectly well. That is how “Phony” opens, with Sonny Cooke (Sam Nivola) narrating the last few weeks of his life over flashbacks of birthdays, school hallways and a private signal he and his mom use to say I love you. The ordinary warmth of those scenes is the point, because the next two episodes spend their time making it feel wrong. Hulu released “Pilot” and “Crosby, Stills, and Nash” together on Tuesday, October 20th. The premise, a boy who wakes from a car crash convinced a stranger is wearing his mother’s face, is one the horror shelf has visited before, usually with a much younger child in the middle and a much grimmer mood. Here the lead is a well-liked high schooler, the mother is Ellen (Connie Britton), who happens to be the principal of his school, and the tone leans toward teen comedy as often as it leans toward dread.
Nick Paley, who co-wrote “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” and directed on “Broad City”, created the series, wrote the first two episodes and directed half of the season. Anthony King is co-showrunner, and Britton serves as an executive producer on top of her starring job. The season runs eight episodes, with a new one every Tuesday through the finale on December 1st. Britton and Nivola turned up in separate seasons of “The White Lotus”, and together they make an easy mother and son. Hulu showed critics only about half of the season, which matters for any verdict on a mystery, because the answer to the central question lives in the half that has not been screened. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Phony” Season 1 episodes 1 and 2.
The ordinary warmth of those scenes is the point, because the next two episodes spend their time making it feel wrong.”
“Pilot” gives its opening stretch to the Ellen that Sonny knows. She is a single mother who runs Delby High, and she shares with her son a squeeze of the shoulder during a hug that stands in for the words. Nine days before the conversation with the investigator, Sharla (Meera Syal), Sonny is planning to sleep with his girlfriend, Chloe (Mahaela Park), for the first time. He has bought a vibrator for the occasion, and his best friend Vogel (Maliq Johnson), laid up with a foot injury, gets talked into playing the school mascot in exchange for a promised waltz at the dance. Ellen has doubts about the relationship and about Sonny applying to colleges far from home. The school also welcomes back Mallory (Grace Brennan), a former crush returning after years of homeschooling. She treats Sonny coldly and says she came to his house after a kiss on a class camping trip, only to be turned away by his mother. Ellen, asked about it on the drive home, does not remember any such visit, and Mallory’s cousin Weldon (Colter Lee), a conspiracy enthusiast, is already waiting in the wings.
That night Ellen finds the vibrator, and the argument that follows ends with Sonny telling her she is afraid of losing control over him, so he storms out of the house. Driving toward Chloe’s and trying to call his mother, he spots a tree that a beaver has felled across the road almost too late, swerves, and sends the car into a pond. He wakes in the hospital about a week later with Chloe and Vogel at his bedside. When Ellen walks into the room she looks slightly but decisively different from the woman he remembers, while nobody else sees a thing. Time says the alteration of Britton is done through a combination of makeup and visual effects. Variety argues that the same effects mute some of her expressiveness.
Sonny’s evidence piles up in small, increasingly strange ways. The photo of Ellen on the school website has been updated, and the Costco card he carries bears a picture of the woman he remembers. When he holds the two side by side, he concludes that they show two different women. A crying infant-simulator doll at school only adds to his unraveling. A panic attack sends him out of the building, and Mallory and Weldon drive him home, where they go through old photos and a home video of Ellen, and Weldon backs him completely while Mallory needs some convincing. The video gives Sonny an idea, so he bursts into the school dance, knocks Vogel to the ground when his friend tries to hold him to the waltz, and throws his arms around Ellen to squeeze her shoulder. She does not squeeze back.
The episode returns to Sharla, who asks where he thinks his real mother is, and it then ends on the beaver building its dam at night with the vibrator among the sticks. A vehicle backs up to the water, and a figure drags what looks like a body out of the marsh and drives away. “Crosby, Stills, and Nash” continues Sonny’s account to Sharla and picks up with him spending the weekend in his bedroom, searching the internet for answers and refusing to eat anything Ellen hands him because he suspects poison, with no phone to call anyone on after the crash. At school the fallout from the dance lands him and Vogel in the office of guidance counselor Mr. Chang (Kelvin Yu), where Vogel, trying to help, mentions that Sonny still thinks his mother is acting strangely. Chloe has grown close to Ellen while Sonny was in the hospital, which makes confiding in her impossible.
A police officer lets slip that someone broke into the house while Sonny was recovering, a detail that does not fit anywhere yet. Sonny and Mallory try to hire a real private investigator online and get nowhere, and the photos of Ellen’s Costco card they print end up in Chang’s hands. For a split second Sonny thinks he has found an ally when the counselor admits that he has noticed a difference in Ellen too. Then Sonny decides he cannot trust him with any of it. Weldon steers him to Sharla instead, who turns out to be less a licensed professional than a regular on local conspiracy forums, and who keeps three tracking dogs named Crosby, Stills and Nash. She starts out doubtful that he has a case, but she knows what it is to be called crazy, and by the end of the visit she takes the job.
Two details outside Sonny’s view keep the hour from reading as pure paranoia. Ellen is shown alone in her office moving a large sum out of her bank account. A teenager fleeing the police near the lake sees something at the water’s edge that sends him running, which the episode ties back to the body from the pilot. Neither episode settles whether this Ellen is an impostor, and a head injury is still a possible explanation. Even so, the money and the body together suggest there is something real out there for Sonny to be right about. The next episode, “Reverse Cuckoo Situation,” arrives Tuesday, October 27th.
Critics who saw the first half of the season are split on how well the central trick works. Time calls “Phony” “a delightfully genre-defying Hulu series” and says that “Phony is something genuinely new on TV.” The Los Angeles Times critic writes “I am all in with this show”, while The Hollywood Reporter finds that the series “isn’t exactly gripping and it’s rarely hilarious” but likable anyway. Variety argues that dimming Britton’s expressiveness leaves only “a mild curiosity, rather than a burning urgency” about where the story is going. Those are real disagreements about the same premise, and they land on one pressure point: the show has to deliver an answer that justifies the question.
The craft argument is the one worth watching as the weeks go on. Taking part of Britton’s warmth away is a gamble. It works in the pilot because the audience is asked to feel that absence along with Sonny, though it might thin out if the show leans on it too long. Paley told TV Insider that he read about Capgras syndrome, the rare condition in which a person believes someone close has been replaced by an impostor, around the time he began the project. He said the emotional core was “rooted for me so much in this phobia that I was going to lose my mom when I was a kid.” That reading gives the comedy somewhere to stand, and it is perhaps what keeps the show tender if the mystery gets silly. The A.V. Club’s critic notes that a lot is riding on the ending, which seems the fair way to hold two strong episodes at arm’s length.
What Do You Think? Is the Ellen who answers the door an impostor, a copy, or the real thing with a son who cannot see her clearly after the crash? Who was dragged out of the marsh, and did the money Ellen moved out of her account have anything to do with it? Will Sharla’s forum-trained instincts get Sonny further than the adults at school have?
See you on the next binge!
