Trash TV: The Watcher

The case of The Watcher is a fascinating unsolved mystery. The link I provided gives the full details, but the gist of it is that an American family purchased their “dream house” and then started receiving creepy and vaguely threatening letters from an unknown stalker. The family were ultimately scared into selling their home at a loss, and the identity of The Watcher was never uncovered.

It’s the kind of story that seems tailor-made for adaptation into a movie or TV series. Indeed, among those who believe that the Broaddus parents made the whole thing up, that’s one of the most popular proposed motives. So how could producer Ryan “American Horror Story” Murphy and a boatload of Netflix cash take such fertile material and turn it into…this?

Netflix’s The Watcher is either one of the most ineptly-made pieces of media I’ve ever seen, or a stealth parody whose cover is so deep that it’s looped back around to being unironically terrible. I honestly don’t think it matters which is true, because the show is a hilarious trainwreck either way.

The basic setup is the same as the real-life incident, except that the Broaduss family is now the Brannock family, and the nice house that the Broaddus family bought is now a tacky pile of shit. In the real story the family never moved into the house, whereas our fictional protagonists are living in the house by the time the first letter arrives–a sensible change in my opinion, as it makes the situation a lot spookier.

What doesn’t make the situation spookier is the cast of bizarre cartoon characters who make up the suspect pool. I’m guessing the neighbours in the real incident were normal people, not the knock-off Twin Peaks weirdos that we get here.

You’ve got a couple who wear identical tracksuits all the time (Why? Fuck if I know) and take great offence at the Brannock’s lanscaping strategy; There’s a local historian who looks like she time-travelled from the 1850s and her brother, who is basically Lenny from Of Mice And Men; You’ve got the realtor selling the house, Nora Brannock’s old college friend who is literally named Karen and has the exact personality you’d expect based on that information; A detective who seems to control the entire town police department to the extent that he can stop 911 from answering the Brannocks  after they get on his bad side (pretty sure that’s impossible).

And there’s even more besides those listed above! Literally everyone the protagonists meet from the moment they set foot in their new house is some kind of over the top caricature. 

The show’s writers seemed not to have been confident in the letters by themselves creating a spooky atmosphere, which is why the house is constantly being invaded by one or more of the aforementioned weirdos, usually the Lenny guy but sometimes others as well. How exactly all of these people are getting into the house undetected is, like all of the show’s mysteries, kind of explained by the end, but not to a level of detail that’s actually satisfying.

Actually, about that. The Watcher is in a bit of an unenviable position, in that it’s about a real incident that was never solved and which happened recently enough that everyone involved is probably still alive and willing to sue if they think they can make a case that they’ve been portrayed negatively. The show gets around this by not really, definitively stating who the Watcher actually is, instead just heavily implying which group of suspects was involved in the scheme and gesturing towards their motives, but keeping most of the specifics up in the air.

It’s probably a smart direction to take given what the show’s producers had to work with, and in the right hands a mystery that goes unsolved can be a satisfying conclusion. That is not the case here, where the show has so many hanging plot threads and unexplained incidents that by the time the final episodes have settled the red herrings and started to pull back the curtain on the (maybe?) true culprits it’s more exhausting than satisfying.

This is not helped by the fact that Nora and Dean are kind of dense as far as investigators go–they wave off multiple extremely suspicious incidents without a second glance, and their go-to strategy when they think they’ve got a suspect is to loudly accuse them in a crowded public setting (they do this like five times even though it always turns out badly). As such, what is supposed to be a story about good people being destroyed by the paranoia and fear brought on by the letters instead comes across as two idiots fucking up their lives for no reason.

The plot has a fundamental tension between wanting to keep the spooks coming and needing to keep the family in the house so the story can continue. In the first episode someone breaks into the house and murders their adorable pet ferret–this is alongside another, different break-in that happens in the same episode, mind you–and apparently even this isn’t enough to convince them to get the hell out.

Actually, why are they in the house to begin with? Dean Brannock sinks all of the family’s wealth into buying it for reasons that aren’t really made clear, and then even once things get dire enough that selling at a loss seems like a justifiable action, they still don’t get out of the fucking house. The characters go back and forth between “WE HAVE TO SELL THE HOUSE” and “WE CAN’T SELL THE HOUSE” about fourteen times over the course of the series, which gets annoying quickly.

Speaking of Dean, one of the strangest things about this series is that the creepiest character in the show isn’t the titular Watcher–it’s Dean,the father of the family. I’m not sure the show’s creators were aware of this.

Dean and Nora have a sixteen (initially fifteen) year old daughter named Ellie, who gets involved with a nineteen year old home security technician. This sets Dean off on your typical “Dad defends daughter’s virginity” shtick, which is one of the five or six stock plots that hack American writers use to pad out their episodes to 45 minutes. What sets this use of the trope apart is the fact that Dean is already acting creepy as fuck towards Ellie even before her older boyfriend comes on the scene.

In an early scene Ellie finds some discarded lipstick in the bathroom, and her putting it on is intercut with Dean and Nora having loud moany TV sex. I really don’t know what the editing here is trying to get across, but regardless, Dean flips out when he sees Ellie wearing the lipstick. Later in the same episode she’s wearing a jumper that leaves her shoulders slightly exposed, which prompts another dadly freakout.

So far so typical, weird editing aside. What really elevates this storyline into “u wot m8” territory is a bit of dialogue later on where it seems like Nora blames her and Dean’s lack of sex-having on Dean’s creepy fixation with Ellie’s virginity. I don’t think we’re supposed to draw that conclusion, but that sure as hell is what the dialogue seems to be implying.

Oh, and then this entire thing gets dropped without any real resolution. Ellie accuses her dad of being racist on TikTok because her forbidden boyfriend is black, it’s meant to be a huge injustice against him, but Dean has been acting so fucking skeevy that it’s really hard to feel sorry for him. Then no one talks about the whole incident again once the episode is over.

And then there’s the boyfriend, who eventually gets eliminated from the suspect pool and is welcomed into the family. He and Ellie insist that the burgeoning relationship is okay because there’s only three years between them and she’s over the age of consent, which is fair enough I guess, but it’s made very clear that Boyfriend Guy (I can’t remember his name) was interested in her when she was still only fifteen. That really seems like it’s pushing it to me.

If you’ve gotten the impression that this show feels like it was assembled piecemeal by multiple different people who weren’t aware of what the others were doing, you would be correct. In fact, the problem goes much deeper: almost from the opening minutes of episode one, The Watcher has a startling lack of cohesion that seems like it could only be explained by some kind of behind the scenes turmoil.

This extends even to what genre the show is trying to be part of. Is it a serious drama? A potboiler mystery? A comedy? Scenes that feel like they were written and acted as comedic are shot with the dark, moody self-seriousness of big-budget Prestige TV, while scenes that are ostensibly meant to be tense or frightening often come across as unintentionally hilarious.

I’ll tell you this, up until the frantic and kind of exhausting finale, it makes for an excellent hate-watch. Grab some popcorn and try out the first two episodes with friends, I guarantee you’ll have a good time. I didn’t even have time to talk about some of the stupid or hilarious shit in here, like the Qanon subplot or the fact that the actor playing Dean only has one facial expression (you can get a preview in the header image for this post).

Somehow this thing has been greenlit for a second season, and let me tell you, I am dying to see where they take it next.