TV Review: ‘Roar’ On Apple TV

It’s been a year and a half, yet it still burns that Netflix went back on its decision to renew Glow and cancelled the series before its final season. In that same year and a half, Glow’s showrunners, Carly Mensch and Liz Flahive, have created a new show for Apple TV+. Roar is a half hour anthology series based on Cecilia Ahern‘s book of the same name. There are eight episodes of Roar and thirty stories in the book, so that leaves plenty of material for future seasons, but each of the episodes is led by a female protagonist. They also all have titles that sound like they would make great writing prompts. The stories write themselves.

The titles are pretty literal, too. In “The Woman Who Ate Photographs,” Nicole Kidman’s character, Robin, eats photographs. Kidman gets to use her real accent for a change, too (as does Cynthia Erivo in a later episode) in this story about a woman who’s preparing to have her mother (Judy Davis) move in with her, and is trying to turn their road trip into a bonding experience.

Robin’s mom has dementia, which explains why Robin’s been going through photo albums lately, but not why she’s started eating the photos inside. What the episode refuses to clarify is whether Robin’s behavior is supposed to be odd or if the mistake is assuming this story is set-in modern-day Australia and not some alternate, sci-fi universe where eating photographs gives people the ability to relive memories. Nothing else in the episode is sci-fi, so it’s feels like an isolated incident but maybe, in the context of this story, she isn’t alone and eating photos is a recognized habit.

That’s the one problem with this series. While it’s fine that all of the episodes are standalone, Roar doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be like The Twilight Zone or not. The result is an inconsistency of tone where some episodes are realistic, some are fantastic, and others (like “The Woman Who Ate Photographs”) fall somewhere in between.

It would be nice, for example, if “The Woman Who Disappeared” was making up the part where Wanda (Issa Rae) can’t get a picture taken at her publisher’s because the camera isn’t able to see her, but facial recognition software not recognizing Black people is a real problem that’s been covered in documentaries like Coded Bias.

Then there’s “The Woman Who Was Fed By A Duck,” which looks at how a relationship can turn abusive in a very honest way. Having Merritt Weaver’s boyfriend in the episode be a duck voiced by Justin Kirk, however, adds nothing to the story. Maybe the idea was to show that abusers can be anyone, but it’s distracting.

On the other hand, “The Woman Who Returned Her Husband” could’ve just been a straightforward story about divorce starring Meera Syal and Bernard White, but by slightly changing the rules and applying a return and exchange policy to spouses (specifically husbands), the episode is able to tell a more complex story about marriage.

In the end, the two strongest episodes are the ones that feature former Glow cast members. “The Woman Who Solved Her Own Murder” stars Alison Brie as a ghost with PMS in an episode that both skewers detective shows like True Detective and comes up with the best concept for a new one.

“The Woman Who Was Kept On A Shelf” takes the idea of hanging a portrait of a loved one in your office to the next level when Amelia (Betty Gilpin) agrees to spend her days sitting on a shelf that her husband (Daniel Dae Kim) installed in his office. Even though the episode never addresses how Amelia goes to the bathroom or changes clothes so often, that’s part of its fairy tale charm, and the musical moments have a real exuberance,

Overall, Roar‘s episodes tend to have anticlimactic endings. Amelia never confronts her husband. Wanda is never seen at her job, but rejoining a party where nothing has technically changed takes heart and is more relatable than sweeping improvements.

All eight episodes of Roar drop April 15th on Apple TV+. I’ve seen all eight episodes.