It’s 1986, and a family is towing their entire house across the water behind a tiny, puttering boat. Then the house starts going under. The father, Leo, goes down with it, and young Calvin Penney cuts the line to save everyone else. In the water he sees something: a void, or maybe the gigantic eye of a very large beast.
That’s how Netflix’s new drama/horror series Below opens. It’s a great first image. The show spends the next six episodes trying to earn it, and mostly doesn’t.
Below is now streaming on Netflix. Its first half is relatively solid. Its back three episodes tie up the story messily and sometimes ridiculously, and the story never fully found its sea legs to begin with.
The Widow’s Bay problem
Below has bad timing. A tiny, remote coastal town suddenly facing a mysterious threat from the sea? Widow’s Bay already did that this year, and Below can’t keep up with it.
Think of it as a “what if Jaws but…” vehicle for Josh Hartnett, who’s on a career upswing with Oppenheimer, Trap (yes, Trap) and a great episode of Black Mirror. He does everything he can to carry this thing, in a thick Newfoundland accent no less.
Hartnett plays grown-up Calvin. His trauma goes back to the night his family was forcibly resettled from one remote town to the slightly less remote Snook’s Arm. (The real Snook’s Arm was itself resettled in 2018.) And that thing he saw in the water? The show doesn’t just put it in the marketing. It brings it up again and again over the season.
Iceberg vodka and a flamingo on the roof
Forty years later, Calvin is a widower who still lives in Snook’s Arm. He hauls flaked-off chunks of iceberg back to the docks and sells them to be made into iceberg vodka (also a real thing).
The Crockers own the distillery. They also own Calvin’s boat and have money in seemingly every darned thing in sight, including the nearby Ocean Science Center. There, lead researcher Dr. Fonda Howander (Mackenzie Davis) studies marine samples and odd wildlife sightings, like a flamingo landing on a resident’s roof.
You can probably guess where this is going. Below is about climate change and capitalism, about what we’ve lost and what we can still save now that both have wormed their way into everyday life. The trouble is the show has little to say about any of it. Mostly it points at the scenery and says, with gumption, “look.”
A better hook than it deserves
That shallow thesis is a shame, because the setup is good. A giant chunk of iceberg drifts into Snook’s Arm harbor. It should be a cash cow for the local ice harvesters, except something about the ice isn’t right.
Meanwhile animals and people near the water start dying mysteriously (something’s in it, remember). The first episode ends on a shocking image I won’t spoil.
The smartest thing Below does is let you believe the cause could be anything, real or mystical. Then it shows that all of it can be explained by science (marine zoobiology, to be specific) or, of course, by the greed of capitalism.
Hartnett and Heaton are the reason to stay
The show is set during a Come Home Year, when scattered residents and family come back for festivities and local traditions, like kissing fish at Snook’s Arm’s one and only dive bar.
Calvin’s mushroom-addled son, Wade (Charlie Heaton), still lives at home. Wade is a townie failson, and his scenes with Hartnett are some of the best in the show.
Calvin’s other two kids, both in their 20s, come home too, and each one brings some big-city baggage. Mary (Ruby Stokes) has a boyfriend she badly wants her dad to like. Jay (Rohan Campbell) seems to be in some trouble and gets threatening texts like, “Your [sic] a dead man.” (Scary typos.)
As the season goes on, the Penney family ends up with too much going on and not enough time for any of it. Almost every one of their arcs needed more room, and a couple more episodes would have helped.
Where it goes off the rails
Episode 4 is where things get wild. It includes a deep-water scene I kind of can’t believe exists, given some real-life events that aren’t that far in the past.
After that, the rest of the season reads like a rush to answer the show’s questions. Some answers do arrive. They aren’t very satisfying, and the plot still has enough holes to sink a boat.
Here’s the fishing analogy Below has earned. You feel a tug on the line and think you’ve caught a big one. Then you reel it in and all you’ve got on the hook is a clump of kelp.
