‘The Watcher’ Sucks the Suspense From a True-Life Horror Story: TV Review
variety.comDaniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic As it’s gone on, Ryan Murphy’s Netflix deal has revealed how many topics fascinate him — and how rigidly fixed in the past are his manners of addressing them.
Has he been able to get beyond the franchises he started on FX? Consider, for instance, his recent smash “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”; the surfeit of punctuation in the title seems to suggest a sublimated desire to call it what it is, another installment of the true-life “American Crime Story” in all but name. “Halston’s” gilded retelling of recent-ish celebrity culture recalled “Feud,” with the adversaries, perhaps, being the designer and his own ego.
And now, with his new series “The Watcher,” Murphy has reverse-engineered an “American Horror Story,” taking a true story and finding within or beyond its nuances some Murder House melodramatics.
Adapted from Reeves Wiedeman’s 2018 New York magazine story, “The Watcher” tells the story of Dean and Nora Brannock (Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts, with two children played by Isabel Gravitt and Luke David Blumm), whose heavily leveraged purchase of a dream home in a New Jersey hamlet is swiftly complicated by the ambient presence of evil.
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